Effects and productive performance of urban agriculture on collective and environmental health in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abstract Urban agriculture may help promote key indicators, such as improvement of environmental health and food security and reduction of social inequality. The present article aims to help understand the current situation of urban agriculture in the city of Rio de Janeiro by focusing on the Hortas Cariocas Program (HCP). To this end, two approaches were adopted. The first one was qualitative and based on a descriptive exploratory method that was used to survey and analyze the impacts caused by the program on the communities involved. The second one was quantitative and based on data envelopment analysis (DEA), which was used to assess and understand the program’s productive performance from 2007 to 2019. The program’s performance showed two peaks, one in 2012 with 80.21% and the other one in 2016 with 100.00% of the productive performance score. The behavior of the annual performance scores can be explained by the increases in the number of people who got directly involved (number of producers) and in the occupied area (number of seedbeds), as they reflect the socio-environmental character of the HCP.