Mia Dancey - Third runner up 2024
Hollard Insure and Farmingportal.co.za and Agri News Net - Young Agri Writers awards - 2024
City of Gold, City of Green
Have you heard of the cows in Soweto? Have you seen the tops of mielie stalks peeking over walls when you follow the M1 south of Joburg?
Urban farming has a long legacy in Johannesburg. You have likely known an aunt or grandmother who grew a garden in her backyard, or a neighbour who reared chickens for some extra cash. Farming in cities is common across the world but is particularly popular in Africa.
It is a marginal practice, rarely included in statistical surveys on agriculture. It is also often an informal practice, largely unregulated by the state. However, for all the talk in South Africa on informality and the second economy, urban farming is rarely mentioned as an informal activity.
So how to bring the question of informality back to the discussion of urban agriculture in Johannesburg?
All enterprises, agricultural or not, start from a place of informality. Formalisation is a tedious process of acquiring various documents from the state – and other formal institutions, like banks – to prove your right to do business.
For farmers, this is an even more taxing process as farming requires access to land. In urban areas, land is severely restricted and most informal farmers operate in tenuous land arrangements that often leave them vulnerable to removal. For urban farmers then, formality confers security as well as respectability, accountability, and the potential for opportunity.
However, most urban farmers remain caught in this grey space between formality and informality; they have some documents, but not all of them. A farmer might have a business registration, but no secure lease for their land. The process of formalisation is a challenging and tiring one.
Consider, Lebo, an urban farmer to the south of Johannesburg. She has recently formed a farming cooperative with a group of other black female urban farmers in the area. They are seeking to secure a grant from the government so they can begin an agro-processing project.
Before applying for the grant, Lebo must have a police officer write and sign an affidavit to confirm the authenticity of her cooperative. On the day Lebo goes to the police station, she lands an unhelpful officer who refuses to write the affidavit for her. “You do it, and I’ll just sign it,” the officer says.
Lebo is in her sixties with minimal education. She has been farming for fourteen years, but recently lost her plot of land to the government. She is trying to rebuild her livelihood, but her efforts to formalise her new farm are stymied by these sorts of bureaucratic inefficiencies.
Being informal, but seeking to formalise, Lebo and others like her have to be strategic. They must manoeuvre through this grey space using the most rational course of action. These strategies largely focus on securing funding and other support, so that they can grow their enterprises from survivalist gardens to fully-fledged urban farms.
But informality is not just survival. Being informal, urban farmers also have the freedom to work outside of restrictive formal regulations. Part of this freedom involves the creation of solidarity economies, or township economies, that exist because of the informal space in which they operate.
Farming in townships means your customers are right next to you. You know their needs and budget. Instead of following shelf price, informal urban farmers find new ways of selling their products to their community.
Waste-exchange programs are common. Most urban farmers are organic permaculturists; they use organic waste for their compost and fertiliser. Farmers in Soweto have developed these programs to sell their produce in exchange for their neighbours’ waste.
These sorts of solidarity economies are transforming urban food production chains. No longer must food come from expensive supermarkets; now it is available from your neighbour, and the price might be your leftover chicken bones or vegetable peels. These sorts of arrangements would not be possible without the flexibility afforded by informality.
Informal urban farmers are not just eking out a living on the margins of Johannesburg. They are actively transforming and re-envisioning what urban food production means. Many have grand plans to build extensive networks, stretching far beyond Johannesburg, to link urban farmers across the country – even across the continent!
While most urban farmers still strive for formality, there is an understanding that such economies and networks require a little bit of informality. In the transformational space of informality, urban farmers are revisioning Joburg not as the City of Gold, but as the city of green.
My name is Mia Dancey, and I am a Joburger born and raised. I recently completed the European Interdisciplinary Master of African Studies in conjunction with the University of Porto (Portugal), University of Bayreuth (Germany), and the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne (France). For my Master’s thesis, I returned to Johannesburg to work with informal urban farmers and their stories inspired me to write this article. In pursuing this research, I hope to contribute to sustainable socio-economic development across the African continent.
