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To boost the overall supply of horticultural produce to the world’s developing cities, FAO promotes the sustainable intensification of commercial market gardening on urban peripheries. In densely populated areas, it has a complementary strategy: to help low-income households improve their food and nutrition security by growing their own vegetables in...

In 2008, the world’s urban population outnumbered its rural population for the first time in history. By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in cities. This urbanization process goes together closely with growing urban poverty and food insecurity. Currently, approximately one-third of the world’s population...

The ongoing exodus of rural people to urban areas in developing countries has led to rapid and massive increases in the urban population. Often rural emigration results in the transfer of poverty, hunger and malnutrition from the countryside to towns and cities, a process known as the “urbanization of poverty”....

The Farmer Field School (FFS) is a process of group-based learning originally developed by FAO in the late 1980s to promote Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in Asian rice fields. At field schools, farmers were able to deepen their knowledge of agroecology, particularly the relationship between insect pests and beneficial insects,...

Urban residents depend on markets for almost all of their food purchases. Urban population growth, rising levels of urban poverty and issues affecting food supply and distribution, to and within cities, have four major consequences for urban food security. Urban and peri-urban horticulture (UPH) can be an important source of...