Integrating cultures and provide healing spaces.

A garden in Kassel, Germany, provides a place for immigrant women to put down roots and cultivate the taste of home. Across the country, such intercultural gardens are helping to integrate cultures and provide healing spaces.

By Angela Boskovitch
WeNews correspondent
October 9, 2007

Excerpt:

KASSEL, Germany (WOMENSENEWS)–Fall is yielding its usual pumpkins, squash and wine grapes and the women stand side by side inspecting their harvest under a typically German sky of fluffy clouds.

Each one has her own small piece of the nearly 11,000-square-foot plot. The apple and pear trees and black currant bushes are considered communal property.

The women–who decided to grow everything organically after holding extensive discussions about pesticides–try to garden together once or twice a week, in sessions that often begin with tea and cakes made according to traditional recipes.

They also plan birthday and holiday observations and occasionally hold cooking groups in their own kitchens where they share the fruits of their labor.

Before they began to work this garden in Kassel the women–about 15 in all, from Morocco, Afghanistan, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia–were accomplished gardeners in their home countries.

But learning to work the German soil, which has a very high mineral content, took time.

A German biologist assisted with the initial planting and since then they have figured out how to cultivate a piece of their homeland here, coaxing Afghan mint, coriander and Iranian leeks from the local soil.

In the process they share not only the flavors of their past but also the challenges of ongoing daily life.

“The garden is a village where different cultures meet and come together to help one another with their problems,” says Sedika Baqaie, who gardens here and is from Afghanistan. “The garden has grown in importance to us over time. Without it, life would be rather boring.”

See the rest of the article here.

See more about intercultural gardens in Germany here.

See a paper in German, “Islam, Environmental Protection and Sustainable Action” here that was carried out by Sigrid Nökel on behalf of the Stiftung Interkultur. The sociologist focused her research on Muslims in intercultural gardens and their interest in sustainability issues.

1918 Cabbages and Queens
Women wearing bloomers, working in a vegetable garden.

Farmerettes of 1918, 100 years after birth of Mrs. Bloomer. In the early Victorian era, the American, Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818-1894), caused quite a stir when she wrote an article for her feminist publication ‘The Lily’. She tried to promote the idea of women abandoning their petticoats for a bi-furcated garment later known as the bloomer fashion. She suggested that woman would find trousers, like those worn by Turkish women, easier to wear than their voluminous heavy skirts.

By Molly Slothower
30 July 2009 MediaGlobal – Voice of the Global South
MediaGlobal is the global news agency, based in the United Nations Secretariat, creating awareness in the media for the countries of the global South, with a strong focus on South-South Cooperation.

Urban agriculture key to alleviating world hunger

The urban poor have been hit the hardest by the global hunger epidemic, which has been fueled by the ongoing food, economic, financial, and environmental crises.

Getting healthy food into cities in sufficient quantities is an extremely difficult task. For the first time in the history of mankind, over half the world’s population lives in cities.

Reached in 2007, that portion is projected to increase dramatically in the next few decades. About a third of all city dwellers, about one billion people worldwide, live in slums. The cost of importing food from rural areas is too much for many of the urban poor to bear.

For much of this population, growing food is the only way to survive and make a living. The practice of growing plants and raising livestock in empty lots, in pots in homes and on stairways and rooftops, on community land in parks or near water sources, or on small plots of land owned by families makes up a half or more of the food required in some cities in the developing world, particularly in Africa and Asia.

In 2003 alone, 49 percent of families living within the borders of the Ugandan capital, Kampala, farmed, and most of those families farmed for basic survival and food security. In the early 1990s, 70 percent of the poultry products consumed in the city were produced inside Kampala.

Food growth in cities is increasing quickly, but not fast enough to keep up with growing urban populations. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has repeatedly called for more attention to the issue and said that urban agriculture is more important than ever in the current food crisis as a source of both nutrients and income.

“Agriculture, especially urban agriculture, has not been given appropriate support for the last 20 years. It is only recently, with the food crisis, that donors and governments in developing countries take seriously how much more help is needed,” Remi Nono-Womdin, an agricultural officer at FAO who is in charge of horticulture and vegetable crops, told MediaGlobal.

Nono-Womdin is the lead technical officer of various FAO initiatives on urban and peri-urban (often known as urban fringe) agriculture projects. FAO has worked for many years with city governments and farmers to support urban farming in places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a joint initiative is underway to support the production of enough fresh vegetables for about 80,000 people to eat and sell.

Urban agriculture plays a critical role in public health in cities during the food crisis, and not just for the large urban portion of the one billion people in the world who live in hunger. Less income means people are less likely to eat healthy foods.

“Higher food prices pushed 115 million people into hunger in 2007 and 2008. The rise in food prices means that people eat less and eat less well. Vulnerable populations switch to cheaper foods that fill them up and ease their hunger, but that are less nutritious,” according to a recent report by the United Nations World Food Programme.

“People who fail to get the correct nutrients and vitamins become more prone to illness, learn less, and have lower productivity. Even a few months of inadequate nutrition could have long-term consequences… for the individual—and offspring—[and] for development and growth prospects of the country as a whole. The cost of hunger is estimated to amount to as much as 11 percent of GDP in some countries.”

There was a widespread effort among governments and development workers in the 1980s to make growing crops and raising livestock in cities illegal. The spread of disease via the use of contaminated water and human and animal feces for agriculture made the practice dangerous, so the crackdown was seen as in the best interest of residents.

But in the urban centers of developing countries, people did not stop growing food. While governments have widely given lip service in the years since the 1996 food crisis to the role urban agriculture plays in food security, many have not followed up with supportive policies and funding mechanisms for urban farmers, according to Nono-Womdin.

These efforts are generally not recognized in national agricultural plans, or city layout schemes, in the places that need it the most. Because urban farming has generally taken place entirely on the initiative of farmers who have not been trained in how to grow safely, a lot of the produce that is grown comes from empty land next to railroad lines where people drop garbage and waste right onto the tracks, under main electrical lines, near sewers, by garbage dumps, close to sewage lines, or in places with a lot of chemical waste.

“Farmers need to secure appropriate land for farming, and to do this they need institutional support,” Nono-Womdin said. “Governments of developing countries tell [FAO] the demand for urban agriculture is there. But it’s time for governments to transform words into actions.”

For city governments and international donors to enable safe agricultural practices that feed as many people as possible, the FAO has 4 major recommendations; secure access to quality land and clean water within cities for agriculture, develop and train farmers in safe and sustainable agricultural practices, include urban agricultural development in official national agricultural plans, and secure markets for city-grown produce.

Link to article here.

The new publication Women Feeding Cities – Mainstreaming gender in urban agriculture and food security is now available online. This publication analyses the roles of women and men in urban food production, processing and marketing in case studies from 3 development regions and includes field tested guidelines and tools for gender mainstreaming.

The publication is based on experiences gained in the context of Urban Harvest, the CGIAR System-wide Initiative on Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture and The Cities Farming for the Future programme of the RUAF Foundation. The book (approx. 370 pages) is published by Practical Action Publishing. For book orders contact Practical Action [ publishinginfo@practicalaction.org.uk ].

Contents table

Preface

Chapter 1 Gender in urban agriculture: an introduction 
    Why Women Feeding Cities?
    Urban agriculture
    Gender in urban agriculture – an analytical approach    
    Women feeding cities – key gender issues
    Mainstreaming gender in urban agriculture efforts
    References 

Part I Case Studies

Chapter 2 
Gender dimensions of urban and peri-urban agriculture in Hyderabad, India
Gayathri Devi and Stephanie Buechler

Chapter 3
Gender in jasmine flower-garland livelihoods in peri-urban Metro Manila, Philippines
Raul Boncodin, Arma Bertuso, Jaime Gallentes, Dindo Campilan, Rehan Abeyratne, and Helen Dayo

Chapter 4
Gender and urban agriculture: the case of Accra, Ghana 
Lesley Hope, Olufunke Cofie, Bernard Keraita, and Pay Drechsel

Chapter 5
Gender in urban food production in hazardous areas in Kampala, Uganda
Grace Nabulo, Juliet Kiguli, and Lilian Kiguli

Chapter 6
Gender dynamics in the Musikavanhu urban agriculture movement, Harare, Zimbabwe 
Percy Toriro

Chapter 7
Key gender issues in urban livestock keeping and food security in Kisumu, Kenya 
Zarina Ishani

Chapter 8
Urban agriculture, poverty alleviation, and gender in Villa María del Triunfo, Peru 
Noemí Soto, Gunther Merzthal, Maribel Ordoñez, and Milagros Touzet

Chapter 9 
Gender perspectives in organic waste recycling for urban agriculture in Nairobi, Kenya
Kuria Gathuru, Mary Njenga, Nancy Karanja, and Patrick Munyao

Chapter 10 
Urban agriculture as a strategy to promote equality of opportunities and rights for men and women in Rosario, Argentina
Mariana Ponce and Lucrecia Donoso                                                                                                          

Chapter 11
The role of women-led micro-farming activities in combating HIV/AIDS in Nakuru, Kenya
Mary Njenga, Nancy Karanja, Kuria Gathuru, Samwel Mbugua, Naomi Fedha and Bernard Ngoda      
             
Chapter 12
Gender dynamics of fruit and vegetable production and processing in peri-urban Magdalena, Sonora, Mexico
Stephanie Buechler                                                                                                                                

Chapter 13
Urban agriculture and gender in Carapongo, Lima, Peru
Blanca Arce, Gordon Prain, and Luis Maldonado                                                                                           

Chapter 14 
Gender and urban agriculture in Pikine, Senegal
Gora Gaye and Mamadou Ndong Touré                                                                                                      

Part II Guidelines for Gender Mainstreaming in Urban Agriculture Research and Development Projects 

Chapter 15 Incorporating gender in urban agriculture projects 
    The urban agriculture project cycle
    Phase 1: Diagnostic research
    Phase 2: Project design
    Phase 3: Activity planning
    Phase 4: Implementation
    Phase 5: Monitoring and evaluation
    Phase 6: Going to scale
    References

Chapter 16 Beyond the project cycle: institutionalizing gender mainstreaming 
    Institutionalizing gender mainstreaming
    Gender mainstreaming in the RUAF network
    Gender mainstreaming in CIP–Urban Harvest
    References

Chapter 17 Tool box for gender-sensitive urban agriculture projects 

    Introduction
    Main diagnostic research methods
    Diagnostic tools
    Design tools
    Activity-planning tools
    Implementation tools
    Monitoring and evaluation tools
    Going to scale (planning follow-up actions, dissemination, policy influencing)
    References

Chapter 18 Resources

    Annotated bibliography
            Gender and urban agriculture: concepts
            Field studies on gender and urban agriculture
            Methodologies and tools for gender mainstreaming in urban agriculture

    Websites 
List of contributors

See the complete book on-line here.

Urban Delight

The street eating graffiti takes no pity on your soul,
Yet a garden chanced upon, in a sea of concrete
Works magic in your bones,
Like foliage embracing stones.

Tilled soil gives birth to bluebells,
Baby’s breath silences the endless traffic
As urban gardeners work miracles,
With seeds of hope.

©2008 Evershed Card Collection

Sustain

Let us water an urban hymn of her
She, the garden, within our cities
A model of life, of love and diversity,
Community gardens everywhere
Are threatened by “development’s” greedy glare.

Till all is concrete with nothing green anywhere.

No poem should ever have a web address in it
But really we are talking about health on this planet,
So here they are, they even rhyme
Visit www.src-mn.org/SRC
and www.worldwidewamm.org
No internet? Go to your library and connect.

A garden is only a tiny first step,
For until we have learned to live off the grid,
Slavery to empirical currency is what the “master” bids,
And hooked up to this synthetic “life support” system
We become, the living dead, hearts disconnected from heads.
Patriots of disparity and uniformed idiots of dread.

Visit Jane Evershed’s web site here.

Edited by Alice Hovorka, Henk de Zeeuw and Mary Njenga
The book (approx. 270 pages)
will be published by Practical Action Publishing, Rugby, UK.
Available: March 2009

Poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition have become critical urban problems. To confront this major challenge, food production in and around cities is an important strategy, contributing not only to food security and adequate nutrition but also stimulating supplementary income generation and social inclusion among low-income, vulnerable households in urban and peri-urban areas.

Women make up the majority of urban food producers in many cities around the world, especially predominating in household subsistence farming, with men playing a greater role in urban food production for commercial purposes.

This is tied to the primary role which women almost always take in feeding their families. Women produce vegetables and herbs in home gardens, community gardens, vacant urban spaces and peri-urban plots, raise animals, act as traders in bringing food from peri-urban and rural areas and selling it to urban consumers, either fresh or processed as dried, preserved or cooked foods eaten at street stalls.

However, the millions of women involved in urban and peri-urban food production, processing and marketing have mostly been invisible to city offi cials, economic planners and development practitioners. This invisibility of women in the urban food economy happened in parallel with the industrialisation of food along with other commodities.

Part I of this volume analyses the roles of women and men in urban food production, processing and marketing and presents various case studies from three developing regions.

In Part II, field tested guidelines and tools for bringing women more into the mainstream of urban agriculture research and development are presented.

See the complete flyer for this book here.