Urban agriculture and political ecology of health in municipal Ashaiman, Ghana

作者：Nyantakyi Frimpong Hanson; Arku Godwin; Inkoom Daniel Kweku Baah

来源：Geoforum, 2016, 72: 38-48.

DOI：10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.04.001

• Urban agriculture
• Political ecology of health
• Embodiment
• Gender
• Agrochemicals
• Ghana

This paper examines the multiple processes that shape the use of agrochemicals and wastewater irrigation in Ghanaian urban agriculture. It further explores whether and how these processes present bodily health challenges for women and men farmers. Qualitative fieldwork was conducted in Ashaiman, a municipal area located about 30 km north-east of Accra, Ghana's capital. Methods of data collection involved in-depth interviews, focus groups and participatory risk ranking and scoring. Conceptually, the paper brings political ecologies of health into closer conversation with scholarship on embodiment and gender. Overall, the findings demonstrate how specific urban agricultural practices are socially produced, how these practices come to affect the human body, and the long-term gendered consequences. One of the contributions of the paper is to draw attention to the nature and cost of urban agriculture in Ghana, a cost not in financial or environmental sense, but in the realm of embodied experiences of exposure to agrochemicals. The paper argues that the current problem confronting urban agriculture in Ashaiman, Ghana, cannot be adequately addressed unless understood as socially produced and historically determined. Further, the health impact of urban agriculture is not only a full bodily experience, but is also gendered. In the end, a case is made as to why gendered bodies demand more critical analysis in scholarship involving political ecologies of health.

• 出版日期2016-6