Vegetable Production among Suburban Dwellers in Ulaanbaatar

In Western countries, the family garden is a means of improving marginalized people’s nutritional status and their quality of life, by encouraging mutual assistance within the neighborhood. For the same purpose, we conducted a project to promote vegetable gardens in Ger districts in the Mongolian capital, Ulaanbaatar, from 2010 to 2014. The paper examines the manner in which the residents adopted vegetable gardens, and specifies the reasons for this adoption, through statistical analysis of data from household surveys carried out in September 2011, 2012, and 2013. Results indicate that while better-off people are enthusiastic about vegetable consumption and are actively involved in vegetable gardens, worse-off people are less enthusiastic about vegetable consumption and are less interested in maintaining vegetable gardens. This finding suggests that urban middle-class people are more aware of and more motivated by the need for vegetables in their lives than urban low-income people.