Category — Latin America

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Organic Urban Agriculture in Quito, Ecuador

If we can plant orchards, build greenhouses and wormeries, buy seedlings, and train people though workshops, we can enable people to provide for and feed themselves and their children.

26% of Ecuador’s children under 5 suffer from malnourishment. Since 2000, the cost of food in Ecuador increased dramatically. It’s cheaper to buy a Peruvian potato than to produce it.

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FAO/UN film (in Spanish) about urban agriculture in Bolivia involving young people. This film shows an FAO initiative which is improving city dwellers’ lives by helping them grow their own food.

Galdino Gonzalez, 56, shows an urban vegetable garden to Reuters journalists in the Iztapalapa district, Mexico City, July 31, 2008. Over 20 urban vegetable patches have been planted since last year, some in areas formerly used to dump trash, and the city government wants to build at least 20 more. REUTERS/Henry Romero

Mexico City poor plant vegetables to lower food costs

By Mica Rosenberg
REUTERS
Jul 31, 2008

MEXICO CITY – Under the rule of the ancient Aztecs, Mexico City was a maze of canals and floating gardens that grew corn and beans to feed the masses.

Hundreds of years later, the government of this concrete metropolis of 20 million people is promoting urban vegetable gardens as a way to ease the burden of soaring food prices faced by poor families.

Leftist Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, who is behind a string of crowd-pleasers like cycle lanes, artificial beaches and an outdoor ice rink, has sent groups of gardening experts out to build community gardens.

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Havana relies on 200 urban farms known as organoponicos

The vegetable gardeners of Havana

By Sarah Murch
BBC Two’s Future of Food
August 2009

Climate change, drought, population growth – they could all threaten future food supplies. But global agriculture, with its dependence on fuel and fertilisers is also highly vulnerable to an oil shortage, as Cuba found out 20 years ago.

Around Cuba’s capital Havana, it is quite remarkable how often you see a neatly tended plot of land right in the heart of the city.

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Lima, Peru; Community Garden on Former Soccer Field; Funded by CARE USA; 1991

These 26 photos are part of a larger collection of documents soon to be housed at Ryerson University in Toronto in the Jac Smit Memorial Library of Urban Agriculture.

“Under the merger arrangement, TUAN’s (The Urban Agriculture Network’s) comprehensive library of documents and materials on urban agriculture will be transferred to Toronto, Canada and supervised by Joe Nasr. Once it is re-established, the collection will be named the Jac Smit Memorial Library of Urban Agriculture and will be made available for use of researchers and practitioners worldwide.

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3 DVDs, Spanish/English, each film lasts 35-45 min.
By Ella von der Haide

In a series of documentaries, Ella von der Haide features urban Community Gardens in Cities in South Africa, Argentina and Germany.

Urban community gardening is a phenomenon that is spreading throughout the world. More and more people are coming together, in order to shape their surroundings and to produce organic food. In addition to gardening itself, there is a great number of social, pedagogical, and political reasons for establishing community gardens, which depend upon the natural and social context of the garden itself, and the imagination and ends of the group.

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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.

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Urban Agriculture clip 1.

This film, produced by the RUAF, is a very good, brief introduction to urban agriculture. Cities visited include: Dakar, Senegal; Hanoi, Vietnam; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Quito Ecuador.

Part 2 of the video is on the following page.

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Photo: The RUAF partners meeting in Doorn, The Netherlands, for their annual meeting.

The RUAF (Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security) publishes this excellent magazine periodically. In their 19th issue, read stories about:

Cleaning, Greening and Feeding Cities; Local Initiatives in Recycling Waste for Urban Agriculture in Kampala, Uganda

Urban Agriculture in Msunduzi Municipality, South Africa

Solid Waste Recycling in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Making a business of waste management

Enhancing Local Knowledge in Urban Livestock Breeding in Bukavu, D.R. Congo

Innovations in Producer-Market Linkages: Urban field schools and organic markets in Lima

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“We are three young women dedicated to promoting urban agriculture in Mexico City, working under the name Sembradores Urbanos (“Urban Cultivators” in English). In August 2007, we inaugurated the first urban agriculture demonstration center in the country, believing that people need to see real examples of how to grow food in the city. The Romita Urban Garden has become our “show garden” – an office, edible garden, education center, workshop site, and a gardening supply store, all on less than 80 square meters of concrete.”

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Photo by Hannah_Y_Juan
Plantings by displaced people in Bogotá’s main plaza.

Article from Latin American Press, April 10, 2008

“Usually when you think of agriculture, you think of a farm, of production per hectare and of profitability. But not in this case,” says Claudia Marcela Sánchez, the coordinator of Bogota mayoralty program that has trained over 40,000 of city’s residents in urban agriculture.

“You can’t compare it with traditional agriculture, which has the aim of generating income,” she says. “This program has goals of building social fabric, and of appreciating agricultural practices.”

“I don’t spend money on lettuce and other vegetables now, because I cultivate them on my terrace,” says Ariznalda Camallo, a resident of Mochuelo, on the southern fringes of Bogota, “Food is so expensive at the moment, so it saves me 80,000 Colombian pesos [US$40] a month.” The Urban Agriculture program estimates average monthly wage in Ciudad Bolivar, the largest and poorest district in the capital, at 200,000 Colombian pesos, or $110, less than half the minimum monthly wage of about $250.

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