Africa's Urban Harvest

Some 15 million Africans abandon the countryside every year in pursuit of better lives in the city. Climate change and further desertification will only exacerbate that trend. How will these ballooning urban populations survive? The best strategy, they're finding, is to begin sowing seeds right where they are. Jocelyn C. Zuckerman reports from some of Africa's most crowded slums and refugee camps:

"The United Nations Development Program recently reported that an astonishing 800 million people worldwide are now engaged in urban agriculture, producing from 15 percent to 20 percent of the world's food. (Many of those people are in Asia, which has a long tradition of urban farming.) Under power lines, alongside highways, down the banks of rivers -- wherever there's unclaimed dirt to be found -- landless city dwellers are grabbing shovels and digging in. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, participation in urban farming has increased from 20 percent of the population two decades ago to nearly 70 percent today."

Thanks to Scott Dodd