The day in the life of an urban farmer in Brazil

By Shanne Claiborne
The Simple Way
A Ghetto Hippies Production
December 2011

An urban homestead in Brazil. Goats, rabbits, chickens, grinding coffee, making peanut oil, sun drying tomatoes, making soap.

Shane Claiborne graduated from Eastern University, and did graduate work at Princeton Seminary. His ministry experience is varied, from a 10-week stint working alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta, to a year spent serving a wealthy mega-congregation at Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago. During the recent war in Iraq, Shane spent three weeks in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team.

The Brazilian project here.

More about Shane here.

Already 13 gardens, 665 persons with direct benefit, 2,660 persons with indirect benefit, 48 professional training courses taught.

São Paulo, a superlative metropolis, boasting impressive numbers revealing of its grandeur, riches, and differences too. A city that together with other 38 municipalities forms the so-called Greater São Paulo, awarding it the title of the world’s fourth largest conurbation, with 19 million inhabitants, while São Paulo city alone is home to eleven million people.

It is within this human context that we lead our daily lives, embedded in a landscape of contrasts, where wealth and poverty coexist. This is the reality and the divide that Organization Cities Without Hunger, through its Urban Agriculture and Community Gardens Project, struggles to overcome by endeavoring to reduce the food and nutritional insecurity of socially vulnerable communities.

Reducing hunger and joblessness by means of urban agriculture and fruit and vegetable gardens is an important contribution to the future of our cities’ sustainability. Such is the mission we set out on, and your participation and engagement play a critical role in this compelling story of responsibility and citizenship.

See Cities Without Hunger website here.

By Antoinette M.G.A. WinklerPrins (Assistant Professor)
In Urban Ecosystems Volume 6, Numbers 1-2 / March, 2002

Abstract: “The division between rural and urban sectors of the landscape in many parts of the world is increasingly blurred. House-lot or homegardens offer a perspective on understanding rural-urban linkages since they are frequently a landscape feature in both settings and the exchanges of their products link the two. House-lot gardens are an under-researched component of the agricultural repertoires of smallholders in many parts of the world. Urban house-lot gardens in particular, have until recently not received much attention despite their critical importance to urban livelihoods.

“This paper presents findings from research on house-lot gardens in rural and urban zones of Santarém, Pará, Brazil, one of Amazonia’s largest municipalities. The research demonstrates that garden products are important for household subsistence, but even more importantly product exchanges between rural and urban kin households help sustain critical social networks that subsidize urban life. Gardens are a link between urban and rural settings as products, germplasm, and household members move between the two. People are urban and rural at the same time which demonstrates that households can be multi-local.”

“The second point is that gardens represent a source of food (especially fruit) for direct and indirect consumption, thereby offering food security. Urban gardening has often been considered a vestige of past rural habits, and as such officials have wanted to remove them from the urban landscape. Instead planners should take advantage of gardens and urban agriculture in general in regions with rapid urbanization. Gardens enable people to continue having access to a food supply, and therefore offer a measure of food security. As Slinger found elsewhere in the Amazon, institutionalized gardening in the form of a planned agroforestry projects yield numerous bene?ts including surplus crop production that permits commercialization (Slinger, 2000). The trend of thinking about gardens as part of the urbanization process should continue and should also embrace the ‘extended’ de?nition of the household instead of the usual single-site households targeted for intervention by development agencies and governments (Ellis, 1998).”

The full paper can be found here.

“São Paulo, the capital city of the state of São Paulo (Brazil) and its metropolitan region are home to the world’s third largest urban population, with 19,385,332 inhabitants, only trailing behind Tokyo and Mexico City.”

“The area where our project holds a regularized, 100,000-square-meter (10 sq. ha.) arable plot – technically fit for the production of vegetables, greens, grains, fruit and medicinal herbs – is delimited by the districts of Terceira Divisão, Bandeirantes, Jardim Laranjeiras, Recanto and Pernambuco, whose population is formed mostly of migrants from Brazil’s poorer northeastern states in search of job opportunity and better living conditions.”

“This project targets the utilization of unused public or private urban land on which vegetable and fruit gardens are implemented by a local population, with a view to providing destitute communities with work opportunities, professional capacity building and income generation through the selling of the produce harvested. Additionally, it aims at combating malnutrition and improving the quality of life of such communities through their access to healthy and nutritional foods, in addition to promoting the communities’ environmental improvement.”

See the complete Brazil project proposal here. (2842 .DOC)