How Far Can Urban Agriculture Go?  Bogota, Columbia

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.

Complete Article by Henry Mance. Apr 10, 2008.
Link to site.

How Far Can Urban Agriculture Go?

Alternative program helps fight hunger in the capital

“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.”

Teams of agronomists have taught vulnerable citizens how to cultivate vegetables and herbs in limited spaces, from small allotments to fizzy drink bottles and wall crannies.??Such agricultural practices are already familiar to millions of Bogota’s residents who have arrived here — pushed by violence and pulled by economic opportunity — from the countryside.

Bogota has grown at a faster rate than almost any other Latin American city since the 1950s, due partly to the levels of violence in the countryside. One such person is Víctor Manuel Serrano: “I arrived 18 years ago. I knew how to farm in the countryside, without the need for all this equipment. It’s good exercise!”

And participants do see clear economic benefits.

Showing results

“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.

Camallo, a local community leader, now wants others to benefit from the training scheme. “I’m working to make my neighbors aware,” she says. “We need to realize: if we don’t work, we won’t have anything to eat.”

The training program is run by the Urban Agriculture Unit, which was established in 2004 by the center-left mayor, Luis Garzón (2004-07). “There were isolated hydroponic programs since the 1980s, but never a general program for the whole city,” says Sánchez.

Garzón’s Bogota without Hunger campaign, which also focused on community dining rooms where vulnerable people received lunch for 300 Colombian pesos ($0.15), drew heavily from Brazil’s Zero Hunger program, but the agriculture component drew more widely.

“Initially, the lack of trust in the state was terrible,” recalls Germán Bueno, who coordinated the Urban Agriculture program in Ciudad Bolivar, Bogota’s poorest district. “The technical team arrived with megaphones to call people together, and no one believed them. Ciudad Bolivar is a locality where the whole world wants to do social work, to be the savior, but often the results aren’t seen. But when people saw the greenhouses and the allotments, the people began to arrive.”

And, while critics have called Bogota without Hunger for being dependency-inducing, Bueno is quick to disagree. The idea, he argues, is that the community takes over the gardens when government support runs out. In fact it’s government administrators who say, “let’s just buy them some food and give it to them,” says Bueno. “And that would be pure asistencialismo.”

An important alternative

“But you can’t say to people who are suffering from hunger that they come to the allotment and in three months they’ll have something to eat,” says Bueno. “You have to give them food immediately and that’s a function which the dining rooms fulfill.”

Since 2004, armed with a budget of approximately 5 billion Colombian pesos ($2.62 million), the program has apparently managed to ward off the doubts of key politicians. When Mayor Garzón left office at the end of 2007, his successor Samuel Moreno, also from the Democratic Pole coalition, pledged to continue urban agriculture, as well as community dining rooms.

However, bringing the benefits to more people may prove difficult. “We’ve used up many of the options for informing people about the project — through local mayoralties, for example,” says Sánchez, who is passing over her role to Bueno.

So, the emphasis may now switch to deepening the project’s impact, for example by promoting more local species — such as Andean grain quinua — and by encouraging composting, so less waste goes to landfill. There are even hopes that the two flagship parts of Bogota without Hunger can become mutually supporting, with the dining room buying produce from the allotments. “Everyone now grows lettuce, so the price is very low,” says one of the program’s agronomists, “But the dining rooms are interested in buying jams and other products, so we’re going to work to commercialize them.”

These ambitions are no longer part of an agenda of agronomic experts: “These are ideas that come from the work in the localities,” says Bueno.