Enhancing the food security of the peri-urban and urban poor through improvements to the quality, safety and economics of street-vended foods

Paa-Nii T. Johnson and Robert Yawson ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: There has been a continuing growth in urbanisation in developing countries, and governments’ face a major challenge in ensuring that city dwellers are able to procure sufficient food. Street foods are sold in almost every country in the world. In most towns and cities in Ghana, selling of snacks and whole meals on the streets is an important way to obtain income, especially among the poor women. Street foods have a long tradition in most countries. The role of this sector in the urbanisation process and the urban economy reflects the way of life and the survival and coping strategies adopted in most African cities. Some earlier studies on street food vending in Ghana have taken place. The FAO and WHO have funded these. Unfortunately, the studies did not include potential food safety concerns such as the presence of heavy metals, pesticide residues and the presence of mycotoxins. The studies did not also examine the contribution of these informal microenterprises to the Ghanaian economy. The DFID/NRI/FRI project on improved street-vended foods was a one-year exploratory study aimed at assessing the safety and quality of food sold in Accra as well as estimates the contribution of this sector to the national economy of Ghana. The project complemented previous work carried on the sector by other workers. This workshop was therefore organized to present findings and identifies new areas where further knowledge is required. As part of this dissemination, key stakeholders of the streetfood vending business in Ghana made short presentations on the status of the foods sold in Accra. These short presentations are also included in this report.

Keywords: Streetfood; microenterprises; mycotoxins; public health; economics; Organochlorines; Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A1 A10 A11 F4 H51 H75 I12 I18 K32 L3 L32 L33 L4 L44 L66 N3 P4 P42 Q1 Q17 Q18 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-09-29
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/33240/1/MPRA_paper_33240.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:33240

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().