2012 年 3 巻 1 号 p. 162-167
The amount of wastewater utilized by urban farmers worldwide is expected to increase due to the rising amount of wastewater generated from urban population. Despite the contribution of urban farmers to generate vast quantity of urban waste including solids and wastewater through agricultural practices, these activities are little recognized by municipal’s management authorities or looked down by the communities, resulting in informal, unplanned and spontaneous practices. Twenty nine farmers from two communities in peri-urban area of Hanoi were involved in the participatory investigation of individual managerial capacity on farming related to wastewater irrigation, i.e., personal characteristics and skills. GIS application and water sampling technique were employed to study the physical environment; questionnaires, in-depth interviews and participatory observation were used to investigate the social, economic and institutional environment that was hypothesized to influence farmers’ managerial capacity. From the assessment of water quality, it can be seen that wastewater irrigation has the potential to be reused for farmers in terms of nutrient recovery and income generation as well as brings high risk for human health relating to pathogens. The factors that influenced farmer’s capacities of wastewater irrigation governance can be categorized into: Internal factors: (1) age of farmers, (2) experience in wastewater irrigation, (3) knowledge and skill, (4) motivation in wastewater agriculture; External factors: (1) institutional environment including regulation on agricultural wastewater use, decentralized/centralized wastewater management, spatial separation on governance responsibilities of different department, state of participatory in local cooperatives; (2) physical environment such as climate change, diseases outbreak, constituent in wastewater; (3) social environment consists of social linkage and norms; (4) economic environment: consumer buying behavior and income from wastewater agriculture. This research concludes that the farmers’ managerial behavior were driven more by economical and physical factors, while institutional and social factors appeared to discourage farmers from high performance in wastewater farming.
