Category — Latin America

A Technical Advisory Committee concluded its 3-day sitting and short-listed 45 submissions from the 387 received from 90 countries

Zawya.com
04 November 2010

An independent jury of international experts has announced the 12 winners of the Dubai International Award for Best Practices to Improve the Living Environment (DIABP) at its eighth cycle. Dubai will host a special ceremony to distribute prizes at the end of this year.

This came at a news conference held by the Municipality on Thursday, attended by Eng. Hussain Nasser Lootah, Director General of Dubai Municipality, Mr. Obaid Salem Al Shamsi, Assistant Director General for International Affairs and Partnership Sector and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of DIABP, Dr. Diana Lee-Smith, Chairperson of the International Jury of the award and Ms. Wandia Seaforth, Chief of Best Practices Programme, UN-HABITAT.

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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.

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Image by Melissa Garcia Lamarca

Urban farmers provide the only source of organic produce in the region

By Melissa Garcia Lamarca
The Polis Blog
Sept. 15, 2010

Excerpt:

Rosario, located in the province of Santa Fe about 300 kilometres northeast of Buenos Aires, was a city that suffered greatly during Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, with poverty levels reaching almost 20% by 2003. One of the responses of the city’s Socialist government was the creation of an Urban Agriculture Office, in the Solidarity Economy Department, initiating an extensive programme across the city that enabled people to grow their own food. Slowly the programme expanded and improved, with the Office serving as a meeting place for people to come and ask for a plot of land in their neighbourhood to grow food, receive seeds as well as the infrastructural, technical and social support they needed to set up or join a garden plot.

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Abalimi Bezekhaya – Harvest of the Hope. Cape Town (South Africa), the business “Harvest of Hope” is selling 170-200 boxes of mixed vegetables a week. Urban Producer Field Schools emphasize the identified weaknesses of production planning, quality control, and pack shed management. This project won the Impumelelo Sustainability Award for 2010

RUAF Update 15 – July 2010

Excerpt:

RUAF from Seed to Table programme

In the past months, the producers who participate in the urban agricultural businesses that are supported by RUAF in 17 cities, have started to harvest and market their first products. Please find some of the experiences described below. All groups have analysed the results from the first production cycle(s) and identified on the improvements to be made in the second production and marketing cycle, which lessons are included in the second round of Urban Producer Field School sessions. New sessions will give for example more attention to Integrated Pest Management, post-harvest technologies and negotiations with buyers.

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Edible Landscape Tools

Minimum Cost Housing Greoup
McGill University, 2005
The project team was formed by the following McGill staff: Prof. Vikram Bhatt, Rune Kongshaug, Prof. Jeanne Wolfe, Francois Emond, Clara Murgueitio, and McGill students: Jingfeng Cai, Lorena Rodriguez, Amal Jamal, Faiza Moatasim, Felipe Ochoa, Shannon Pirie, Li Ran, Yalda Rastegar, Guy Villemure and Nicholas Vreeland.

Making the Edible Landscape is a three-city project with the core objective of integrating Urban Agriculture as a permanent element in low-cost housing settlements. These three participating cities are: Columbo, Sri Lanka; Kampala, Uganda; and Rosario, Argentina. From existing settlements upgrading to the new urban developments in the partner cities, the project intends on applying UA as a subsistence resource for personal consumption and income generation.

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Growing fruit and vegetables in and around cities increases the supply of fresh, nutritious produce and improves the urban poor’s economic access to food

FAO urban projects in: Plurinational State of Bolivia, Burundi, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, Namibia, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Senegal, Venezuela. Details here.

Excerpt:

Fruit and vegetables are the richest natural sources of micronutrients. But in developing countries, daily fruit and vegetable consumption is just 20-50 percent of FAO/World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations. Urban meals rich in low-cost fats and sugars are also responsible for rising levels of obesity and overweight. In India, diet-related chronic diseases, such as diabetes, are a growing health problem, and mainly in urban areas.

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University of Miami student Camille Kremer, right, and Florida International University student Ann Marie Warmenhoven are honored by Clinton. “You really do have the power to change the world, and you don’t have to be wealthy to do it,” Clinton told an audience of more than 5,200 people, most of them students, who had gathered at the arena for the opening plenary address of his Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) meeting.

Rasin Lavil Bay Lavi (Urban Roots Give Life) Haiti

Clinton used the Commitment to Action to honour two students to inspire the audience. Urban Roots Give Life, a project of Camille Kremer and Ann Marie Warmenhoven, will establish sustainable urban gardens in Shada, Cap-Hatien, providing a source of local, homegrown food for a nation that imports half of the food it consumes despite having fertile soil.

Their project is especially important to Cap-Hatien, Clinton said, because the region has experienced a massive influx of internal refugees who fled Port-au-Prince in search of better living conditions after the quake destroyed much of the capital’s infrastructure.

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Brazilian Estevao Silva da Conceicao jokes with his daughter at the garden of his house at Paraisopolis favela in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Photo by Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images

Opinion: Let’s hear it for urban agriculture

By Sara Franklin
GlobalPost
March 29, 2010

Excerpt:

In the sprawling megalopolis of Sao Paulo, Brazil, I recently witnessed how a humble NGO is quietly transforming an entire region of the city by building micro-enterprises out of organic farms and gardens.

Sao Paulo is the world’s third largest metropolitan area, trailing only Tokyo and Mexico City in size. In recent decades, Sao Paulo has grown at an alarming rate. As big agribusinesses buy up land that has historically been used for subsistence agriculture, rural Brazilians — particularly those in the northeast — are displaced from their homes and forced to migrate toward cities, particularly those in the more prosperous southern part of the country.

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Agricultura Urbana Ciudad Bolívar

Ana María Niño. Coordinadora General Del Proyecto
Luis Edurdo Tiboche S. Recopilación Y Textos
March 2010
9000 words in Spanish

Presentación.

La Agricultura Urbana en Ciudad Bolívar se ha venido consolidando en los últimos años. Desde el año 2005, durante la Administración Distrital del Alcalde Luis Eduardo Garzón, cuando se dio comienzo al Proyecto Piloto de Agricultura Urbana enmarcado dentro de la Política Pública de Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutricional SAN, más y más Agricultores se han sumado a esta tarea de producir alimentos orgánicos que contribuyan a minimizar problemas de Hambre y eleven la calidad Nutricional de grandes grupos de nuestra población. Y a este propósito, interpretando los postulados enmarcados dentro de los Planes de Desarrollo Local se han vinculado en forma entusiasta las últimas administraciones Locales.

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GlobalGiving is an online marketplace that connects you to the causes and countries you care about. You select the projects you want to support, make a tax-deductible contribution, and get regular progress updates – so you can see your impact.

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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