Can urban agriculture make cities green again?

Over 56% of the global population live in cities. By 2020, it is expected that this figure will be over 70%, according to the United Nations. But while cities continue to grow, the countryside in them is shrinking. Natural spaces in cities diminished from 19.5% in 1990 to 13.9% in 2020. Another worrying statistic can be added to this: over 2 billion people could be exposed to an increase in temperature of at least 0.5°C in cities by 2040, warns the latest UN-Habitat report.

In such a scenario, the green shoots of urban agriculture are emerging. From community allotments in populated quarters to local woods (“micro-forests”) being grown in arid cities, initiatives by residents are sowing new ways of urban living.

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Carioca allotments in Rio de Janeiro
Harvesting in times of crisis in Rosario
A jungle in the desert in Lima

In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where houses seem to be piled one of top of the other, allotments are returning something more than food to the people. Since 2006, the project Hortas Cariocas, funded by the City Hall, fosters the creation of organic allotments in schools and low-income communities. The idea is not only to grow food, but also to generate jobs, access to fresh produce and empower those carrying out the task.

Fifty-six areas of Rio now have a system of urban agriculture producing around 1,000 tons of food for more than 10,000 families.

Every community receives training, equipment, uniforms and seeds. In exchange, urban farmers must donate half of their harvest to local schools. The rest can be sold, consumed or donated according to the criteria of each community. The project’s aim over time is that residents learn to manage the allotments themselves, self-sustainably.

The biggest success has been in the area of Manguinhos, home to the largest urban allotment in the whole of Latin America, with a diameter of 1km and more than 300 seed orchards.

In 2001, in one of Argentina’s worst economic crises to date, a group of neighbors in Rosario decided to sow on wasteland, giving birth to the first community allotments in the city at a time when half of the Argentine population was living below the poverty line.

Today over 300 people – 60% of them women – grow collectively in seven allotment parks and tens of smaller allotments in their neighborhoods. Overall, 75 hectares of urban land are being used to produce some 2,500 tons of fruit and vegetables per year.

“Consumers benefit because our product is fresher and affordable, given that it doesn’t have to be transported 500 or 600 kilometers,” urban farmer Marisa Fogante told the World Resources Institute. “There’s a virtuous circle in which local producers grow products they can sell here and consumers can easily access them while out walking or by bicycle.”

In Latin America and the Caribbean, few cities have this kind of urban agriculture program. In the case of Rosario, the Urban Agriculture Program is a public municipal policy which, since 2002, has made available disused land within the city to be worked during times of economic, social and political crisis.

The program, which has received international awards, has since expanded gradually to areas surrounding Rosario, giving rise to the Green Belt Project in 2015 allowing permanent use of 800 hectares of suburban land for organic fruit and vegetables.

They also founded a seed bank for safeguarding around 400 plant species. Here, seeds are distributed twice a year to volunteers, who learn to sow them and return new seeds to the bank, ensuring its diversity and continuity, forming a circular system connecting food, biodiversity and community sovereignty.

In San Juan de Lurigancho, the most populated district of Lima, a family has cultivated the unlikely – a grove in the middle of an urban desert. It all began in the 1980s when Esther Rodríguez Huamán decided to sow life onto the hillside where she lived with her family. Over four decades later, her legacy is a small ecosystem full of trees growing oranges, lucumas, mangoes, medlars, mandarins, olives, grapefruits and guanabanas, also home medicinal plants, birds and butterflies.

To sow food in the desertified capital, the family brought cuttings from other parts of Peru, and built stone and earth walkways using thousand-year-old techniques learned from the Incas, not forgetting two water wells. In this way, they transformed 4,000 square meters of hillside into a green oasis, refreshing the city air and improving the local micro-climate, as reported in an article in Spain’s El País newspaper.

In a district where access to green areas amounts to as little as 1.6 sqm per inhabitant, far below the 9 sqm recommended by the WHO, this “hidden jungle”, as they call it, has become a lung, refuge and open classroom for neighbors and schoolchildren alike.

Sources:

Journalist specializing in International Cooperation Peruvian. With a Masters in International Journalism from Pompeu Fabra University (Spain). Awards include the Barcelona School of Management Prize for Best Gender Project and grants from the Earth Journalism Network. Writes about climate change, conservation and the indigenous peoples of Latin America for El País and Dialogue Earth, with a focus on solutions. Her stories can also be read in Periodistas por el planeta, France 24, Agencia EFE and Climate Tracker, among others. She has worked in communications and ‘storytelling’ for international organizations such as the United Nations and worked on the editorial team of the Climate Migration initiative.

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