YAOUNDÉ, 27 May 2008 (IRIN) - Jacques Biyiha came from the countryside to the big city to seek his fortune in the 1970s when the country was in the midst of a construction boom. He continues to live there today, but he hasn't worked in construction for 15 years. He is an urban farmer, as are many people in Cameroon's largest city.

"It can be quite profitable," Biyiha said, showing IRIN his lush fields of corn, cassava and beans which lie between electricity poles and houses. "Farming in the city means it's easier to get produce to market because the market is right here."

For Biyiha the current market is bullish. He and other urban farmers IRIN spoke with said they were ecstatic about the rising price of imported food.

"Now our produce is competitive," Biyiha said. "With the coming harvest I hope to earn more money than ever."

Civil servants

Land is often fertile in Cameroon's towns and cities which tend to be spread out so there is plenty of it. With good rains, urban farmers often have two growing seasons a year.

Since Cameroon was hit by an economic crisis in the 1980s unemployment has grown dramatically while salaries for those with jobs have dropped by an estimated average of 70 percent.

Even people with jobs often have plots of land they farm on the weekends, an advisor to the minister of agriculture Rabelais Yankam Njomou told IRIN. "In recent years almost everyone farms. It is what keeps this country going."

Yankam Njomou said that many city dwellers started farming to subsist but have expanded and are now selling what they don't eat. One such person is Clémentine Diapa who has taught at the public high school in Yaoundé for the last 22.

"After my husband died I realised that I would never be able to look after my seven children on my salary," she said.

Diapa now has a 2000 sq metres of farmland in Yaoundé, where she grows corn, cassava and garden vegetables.

"We don't worry about the recent food price rises," she told IRIN. "We grow so much that I now earn more money from farming than from the salary I get from the school."

Youth

Urban farming had mostly been for older people but it has increasingly attracted youth.

"It's not that we are shelving our ambitions," Hiol Cyrille, who studied business management and is part of an association of youth raising pigs. "It's that farming gives us stability so that we can prepare for our futures," he said.

The association, which is based in the Doaula neighborhood known as PK8, has its own pig farms where youth work. But once its members learn how to run a pig farm they go off and start doing it on their own.

"Many youth here were planning to leave Cameroon and go to Europe saying they had no hope of making a living," he said, "but now all of them intend to stay"

Pollution

One problem with farm produce from urban areas is it is often polluted. People in Yaoundé mostly reside on hills encircled by swampy valleys which are used as farm land, but untreated sewage often drains into them.

Nzegan Martin, a representative from the non-governmental organisation Service d'Appui aux Initiative Locales de Développement (SAILD) took IRIN to Yaoundé's hilly Ngousso's neighbourhood which has a large hospital complex.

Untreated waste water from the morgue flowed into a field of corn below.

"A lot of waste water flows into farm lands here and eating the produce is extremely risky," Martin said.

Yankam, the agricultural advisor, told IRIN that the European Union is providing the government with funding to support urban farming but he did not know of any effort to stop the polluting of the land.

"I know it's a very dangerous situation," he said, "but it is not a matter for the agriculture ministry. The health ministry needs to take responsibility."

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