Abstract
Urbanization is a main driver of agricultural transition in the Global South but how it shapes trends of intensification or extensification is not yet well understood. The Indian megacity of Bengaluru combines rapid urbanization with a high demand for dairy products, which is partly supplied by urban and peri-urban dairy producers. To study the impacts of urbanization on dairy production and to identify key features of dairy production systems across Bengaluru’s rural-urban interface, 337 dairy producers were surveyed on the socio-economic profile of their household, their dairy herd and management, resources availability and, in- and output markets. A two-step cluster analysis identified four spatially explicit dairy production systems based on urbanization level of their neighborhood, reliance on self-cultivated forages, pasture use, cattle in- and outflow and share of specialized dairy genotypes. The most extensive dairy production system, common to the whole rural-urban interface, utilized publicly available feed resources and pasture grounds rather than to cultivate forages. In rural areas, two semi-intensive and one intensive dairy production systems relying on self-cultivation of forage with or without pasture further distinguished themselves by their herd and breeding management. In rural areas, the village’s dairy cooperative, which also provided access to inputs such as exotic genotype through artificial insemination, concentrate feeds and health care, was often the only marketing channel available to dairy producers, irrespective of the dairy production system to which they belonged. In urban areas, milk was mostly sold through direct marketing or a middleman. Despite rapidly progressing urbanization and a population of 10 million, Bengaluru’s dairy sector still relies on small-scale family dairy farms. Shifts in resources availability, such as land and labor, are potential drivers of market-oriented intensification but also extensification of dairy production in an urbanizing environment.
Highlights
As rural areas are taken over by rapidly expanding cities, the spatial flow of agricultural products between rural producers and their urban consumers is at the heart of complex social-ecological systems (SES) extracting local resources [1,2,3]
By its nature and scope, urbanization increases the risk of breaking off this equilibrium: one impact of urbanization is the dichotomization of rural and urban worlds spatially and on a sectoral basis, with the rural space dedicated to agricultural production and the urban one to consumption [1, 6]
Taking dairy production in Bengaluru, India, as an example for production systems in an urbanizing environment and a discussion point on social-ecological linkages in the same context, the present study considers urban, peri-urban and rural areas in and around an emerging megacity to tackle the following research questions: do distinct dairy production systems (DPS) coexist along a rural-urban interface and how are they impacted by urbanization? To answer these questions, we surveyed 337 dairy producers in and around the emerging megacity of Bengaluru in southern India
Summary
As rural areas are taken over by rapidly expanding cities, the spatial flow of agricultural products between rural producers and their urban consumers is at the heart of complex social-ecological systems (SES) extracting local resources [1,2,3]. Producers and consumers within a same SES are further linked by different flows of material, people, information and financial capital: on one hand, through consumption patterns, urban consumers influence the goods and services produced by farmers and their management practices [4] It shapes farmers’ use of critical agricultural resources (land, water, capital and labor) and agricultural production systems. By its nature and scope, urbanization increases the risk of breaking off this equilibrium: one impact of urbanization is the dichotomization of rural and urban worlds spatially and on a sectoral basis, with the rural space dedicated to agricultural production and the urban one to consumption [1, 6] This dichotomization leads to further distance between producers and consumers: i) a psychological one; that is the concerns of the consumers regarding social and ecological consequences of their consumption decrease, especially regarding negative environmental externalities [2]; and ii) a structural one; that is intermediaries in the value chain are multiplied as durability of primary agricultural products is increased by processing, and as transport distances increase [4, 7, 8]. In various major West African cities [14,15,16], distinct livestock production systems coexisting within the same urban and periurban space have been documented, ignoring the livestock production systems at the rural periphery of the cities and the SES in which they are embedded
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