City-Level Decoupling-Case Studies

their plots for over 50 years have been filtering water out of the waste stream. Adopting this practice has enabled them to maintain their livelihoods and their own sustenance, and to contribute to the greater food security of local communities and by implication the city itself. With clean water difficult to come by, wastewater has a vital enabling role in urban agriculture practice, which itself is the building-block for a value chain of related employment activities in the informal sector. Using wastewater for crop irrigation has numerous potentials. Primarily it can provide a fundamental service for the city by reusing liquid effluent discharged by local districts. Removing liquid effluent from the waste stream contributes towards closing resource loops by turning outputs of the system into useful inputs, which contain a greater nutrient value than treated piped water. The Accra Metropolitan Assembly permits wastewater irrigation solely for root vegetables, frequently performed through furrow irrigation, ensuring that leafy vegetables and others that are traditionally eaten raw are not contaminated by the potentially harmful pathogens in the effluent water. The social and environmental value of urban agriculture to Accra is increasingly being realised, but the support from various actor groups has yet to be translated into a cohesive formal policy at the National or Metropolitan scales. Chief among the groups recognising the potential for wastewater recycling through urban agriculture have been the International Water Management Institute and the Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security. Together with several other key interested stakeholders, they form the Accra Working Group on Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture (AWGUPA). This consists of 15 member-groups including NGOs, CSOs, the University of Ghana, farmers associations and, crucially, governmental departments of planning, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and the Accra Metropolitan Assembly. This relationship has fed into initiatives that attempt to train and educate farmers in the safe use of wastewater to reduce contamination, rather than criminalising the practice. Beyond this, AWGUPA has been working to enhance the legitimacy of farming groups in Accra and recognising the valuable service they provide the city through their use of liquid effluent. Though initially an ‘unplanned' intervention, as farmers responded to limited access to clean water, wastewater-fed agriculture in Accra has brought these stakeholders together and now more vigorous calls are being made to enhance the legitimacy of farming groups in the city by recognising the potential of the contribution they make towards more sustainable resource management through the reuse of liquid effluent. Key obstacles to the institutionalisation and gradual scaling-up of the practice include the threats posed by buildings encroaching on farmland, and by the non-committal attitudes of governmental authorities and the traditional council. Growing pressures on land in Accra resulting from continued urbanisation and housing shortfalls have resulted in many such encroachments, frequently on highly unsuitable land. This land, commonly appropriated by farmers, is held in trust by the State on behalf of the Traditional Councils. In spite of the illegitimacy of the act, members of the Traditional Councils can be easily tempted into selling off parts of the land for development. As a result, urban farmers have little or no land security, and consequentially lack livelihood security.

Farmers receive limited support in reacting to physical impediments such as the siltation of drainage channels relied upon for the delivery of wastewater – a situation further exacerbated

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