Paper short abstract:

In West Cameroon, villages with performing agriculture control the emerging space that fully participates in globalization. Towns remain languid or are increasingly short-circuited in the international food stock trade. Pressure groups from the big cities have much to do with these mutations

Paper long abstract:

Contrary to the commonly accepted idea, small urban centers of Western Cameroon, practically has little or no territorial anchorage, very little control over the production of wealth and consequently on the local economy. A number of political, social and rural-urban stakeholder factors play to keep these centers away from the local economic dynamics.

Social actors from large cities, transposed economic games to the antipodes; upstream are population creation: agro-towns that control international trade of agricultural products. They are directly connected to main national and sub-regional towns. Downstream, the Divisional headquarters are increasingly short-circuited in the international trade.

At the center, the sub divisional headquarters, languid, has remained the seat of the forum of the political game within the Municipal Council animated by individuals or pressure groups from the big cities. Alliances are formed and unfold according to the interests of the villages from which one is a native.

This power play is constructing a space where some villages emerge and fully participate in globalization while towns, small or medium, through political gambit put themselves at the service of the villages with very little to gain in return.

The countryside of Western Cameroon is recovering its primacy in rural economy and an apparent emancipation from the weight of the city. In reality, the city, insidiously takes control over the countryside, downgrading to the background or even dismissing from the political sphere and the management of rural affairs, those residents who until then were opinion leaders in the rural world.

Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights urban food systems research from East Africa conducted by Agha Khan University and the University of the Fraser Valley. Mixed method approaches have led to better understandings of urban food security. The viability of intra-urban food systems will be discussed.

Paper long abstract:

Food security dynamics in East African cities are changing and the ways in which food systems are governed need to change as well. Rapid urbanization is stretching existing food systems and growing cities are grappling with the challenge of meeting food and nutrition security for their inhabitants. In addition, industrializing food supply chains is changing food consumption behaviors and contributing to environmental degradation. In this regard, there is need for a holistic ecosystems-based approach for urban-rural/regional food systems that guarantees food security among urban households, contributes to poverty alleviation, and integrates spatial planning to strengthen urban resilience. Agha Khan University (AKU), in Nairobi Kenya, is collaborating with the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in Abbotsford, Canada to contribute to sustainable urbanization in East Africa by promoting visibility and awareness on resilient urban food systems to urban authorities, local urban residents, civil society, business, and academic institutions. These projects seek to engage, exchange experiences, identify best practice, and develop, in a participatory way, innovative policy instruments and tools. This paper will detail the current efforts of AKU and the projects in which UFV student interns have been actively involved. The discussion will highlight the scope(s) of the project, initial research findings and methodologies, and future directions which can promote food security, increased work opportunities, and economic equality for many East Africans.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses informal and formal pork slaughterhouses in Kampala, Uganda. It focuses on themes including urban livelihoods, disease management and the aesthetics of pork meat in order to demonstrate the importance of informal slaughterhouses within the Ugandan pork market.

Paper long abstract:

Ugandans reportedly eat more pork meat than any other nation in East Africa. Despite this, in Kampala there is only one government approved slaughtering facility- Wambizzi. With increasing pork consumption and limited formal slaughtering facilities, informal slaughterhouses have proliferated throughout the city. Subsequently, pork meat produced in informal slaughterhouses is supplying a vast number of butchers throughout Kampala.

Based upon data from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork on the Ugandan peri-urban to urban pig value chain, this paper considers the ability of informal slaughterhouses to manage diseases. Informal slaughterhouses are considered to have significant public health implications for pork consumers, particularly in relation to the zoonotic disease cysticercosis. Wambizzi, conversely, is considered to meet international food safety standards. However, in practice the visibility and removal of cysts is similar within both informal and formal slaughterhouses. In both sites actors decide whether a carcass is diseased based on the aesthetics of the pork meat. While in Wambizzi meat inspectors identify cysts in pork in order to produce meat 'fit for human consumption', in informal slaughterhouses workers remove cysts in order to achieve the highest price when selling meat on to butchers. Both methods result in visible cysts being removed from pork meat.

Informal slaughterhouses, therefore, do not necessarily produce substandard meat to Wambizzi. Through demonstrating the value of informal slaughterhouses within the Ugandan pork market, it is argued that these spaces should be not be criminalised but instead recognised as legitimate suppliers of pork meat within Kampala

Paper short abstract:

Mayotte island is the southern most of the Comoros. Urbanization changed food market organization. From road market to official ones in secured places in main towns to informal ones at the country side and the illegal ones closed to downtown places.

Paper long abstract:

Mayotte population had increased from last decade but also moved to main town Mamoudzou and its suburbs. Food markets have been reorganized. Administration built new places as covered marked to include food market in national health security policy. But road markets still remain in the countryside, mainly at important crossroads north and south of the island. Women are still the seller in vegetables and fruits markets. Illegal markets also still remain closed to the local marked and navy station. But selling is not a women activity as fish is concerned. A legal cooperative must sell fishs fromm the lagoon but every day men are selling fishs of the day closed to the fishing port where cars can stop and buy on way back home at night. Some of them are also walking through villages main streets as a new form of door-to-door selling for they fishs. Mayotte food markets seem to be between to systems. Moreover people use all forms of market as easyness of everyday life, despite of small different habits betwwen Mayotte people, underground population and Mzungu from France or la Réunion.

Paper short abstract:

This study how recent commodity booms have affected through time the rural-urban nexus of the city of Tulear and its hinterland, in the sensitive socio-ecological context of the southwestern region of Madagascar.

Paper long abstract:

Many African cities are experiencing fast processes of urbanisation, which pace challenge the sustainable provision of basic goods and services to their populations. At the same time the social and economic linkages of these urban centres with rural areas supplying much of such goods continue being close although ever-evolving, often as a consequence of influences from beyond the local sphere. The case of the regional capital of southwestern Madagascar, Tulear, and its hinterland is illustrative of these issues. Having experienced an intense growth in the last decades, the city has had a deep impact on its surrounding environment, particularly due to the urban demand for domestic energy and food. In parallel, Tulear has played a pivotal role in the articulation of the cross-scalar dynamics connecting global markets to rural producers throughout the region, particularly in relation with agricultural commodity booms. That was the case of the maize export market triggered by the demand from Île de la Réunion in the 1990s, or the ongoing cotton boom, spurred by the installation of several Chinese companies and processing factories in the area. While catalysing profound rural land-use change processes, these dynamics might encourage urban actors to engage in the boom attracted by the promise of rapid gains, which in turn can result in the surge of speculative cycles and distorted market practices. This paper therefore explores how the recent commodity booms in southwestern Madagascar have affected through time the rural-urban interface in a sensitive regional socio-ecological context.