Organic Gardens Feeding People from Argentina to Haiti

Learning to Garden in Haiti. Photo by walkingwithward2009.

13,000 Haitian families currently work with 23 agronomists in the “ti jaden òganik” (Creole for “small organic garden”)

By Jane Regan and Marcela Valente
IPS
Oct. 22, 2010

Excerpt:

BUENOS AIRES/PORT AU PRINCE, Oct 22, 2010 (IPS) – Neither hurricanes nor floods, nor the devastating January earthquake or Haiti’s chronic political instability managed to wipe out the organic gardening initiative underway in that country since 2005. The seed was planted in Argentina twenty years ago.

Some 13,000 Haitian families (90,000 people in all) currently work with 23 agronomists in the “ti jaden òganik” (Creole for “small organic garden”) project, growing their own food. The goal is to engage one million people in this form of production.

The aim of the programme, which began in Argentina under the name Pro-Huerta and is known in French as Programme d’Autoproduction d’Aliments Frais (“Self-Sufficient Fresh Vegetable Programme”), is to promote organic gardens in both cities and rural areas

So when the Haitian capital and several smaller cities and towns were devastated by the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people and left 1.3 million homeless, some families had their own garden production to fall back on and cover some of their food needs, agronomist Emmanuel Fenelon, director of the programme in Haiti, told IPS.

“Some families told us they were glad they didn’t have to stand in line all the time to suffer the humiliation of asking for food,” Fenelon said.

The initiative first emerged in Argentina in 1990, where it has since grown to 630,000 gardens and farms distributed in 3,500 urban and rural settings across the South American country. The model has also been replicated in other countries of the region, including Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Venezuela.

Read the complete article here.