Benefits and Selected Health Risks of Urban Dairy Production in Nakuru, Kenya

Health risks from food production in urban areas are attracting increased international attention, especially in poor countries with rapid urbanization where urban farming is widely practiced to mitigate hunger and poor nutrition as well as reduce food expenditures. This study examines a selected range of health risks as compared to the benefits for an urban population for which a considerable quantity of back-ground data are available, namely Nakuru municipality in Kenya. The research was carried out in conjunction with a related survey of crop-livestock-waste interactions in the same town, described in the previous chapter.Smit (1996 ) predicted that urban agriculture (UA) would be contributing one-quarter to one-third of world food production, including half of vegetables, meat, fish and dairy products consumed in cities by 2005. In the cities of eight East and Southern African countries (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe), Denninger et al. (1998) estimated that nearly 25 million out of 65 million people in urban areas got some of their food from UAand that by 2020 at least 35–40 million urban dwellers in the same countries would depend on UA to feed themselves. Lee-Smith et al. (1987 ) showed that two-thirds of urban households in Kenya grew part of their food, while 29 percent did so on urban land. Similar figures have recently been confirmed for the town of Nakuru, where three-quarters of households were farming in 1998, 35 percent on urban land. A quarter and a fifth of Nakuru households grew crops or kept livestock respectively, with the livestock population estimated to be 160 000 poultry, 25 000 head of cattle, 3000 goats, 3500 sheep and 1500 pigs (Foeken2006 , pp. 38, 67).

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