“Every week, Ezequiel Dias, an urban farmer, knocks on the doors of his community’s red-brick, makeshift houses with a delivery of fresh sweet potatoes, pumpkins, onions, cabbage and herbs.
He checks to see if the families require additional help. Some need facemasks, others need soap. But few are hungry. Many of his neighbours – the majority of whom are informal workers, who make up approximately 60 percent of Rio de Janeiro’s labour force, with little-to-no savings – have been unable to work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 44-year-old Manguinhos resident knows the grim reality well. Many years ago, he too was at rock bottom. ‘I was unemployed for five years, helpless, with my family at home to feed,’ he told Al Jazeera.
‘Then suddenly, the Manguinhos vegetable garden project appeared and turned my life around,’ he added.
The Horta de Manguinhos project (Manguinhos vegetable garden), an urban agriculture initiative and Latin America’s largest community farm, is helping at least 800 families survive the coronavirus outbreak, as well as employing more than 20 local workers at a time when Brazil grapples with a pandemic-battered economy.
Dias, who has been employed by the project since it launched in 2013, is now providing seeds of hope to many of the 32,000 residents of Rio’s North Zone Manguinhos complex, one of the city’s poorest clusters of favelas.
According to a 2015 study by Brisbane’s Griffith University, the demographics and standard of poverty in the area are bleak.
More than 15 percent of teenage women have children and in some areas, unemployment is more than 50 percent, making Manguinhos’s Human Development Index as little as 0.65 percent, among the five lowest in Rio de Janeiro, said the report, which was conducted between 2010 and 2015.
“Our lives are always a fight”
Hortas Cariocas, which founded the Manguinhos vegetable garden project, is one of the few municipal-led social development initiatives that aim to alleviate poverty in communities like Manguinhos. The project was founded to solve food insecurity, boost the local economy and provide fresh, affordable food to residents who would often go weeks without meat or vegetables.
‘When we wanted to create the farm 15 years ago, the first thing we thought was that the poor can’t afford to eat organic. The poor need to eat organic, without having to spend a fortune in the supermarket,’ explained Julio Cesar Barros, creator of the Hortas Carioca Project.
In collaboration with the Manguinhos Residents Association and with municipal and federal funding, the project supplies workers with training, basic equipment and enough food to take home to their families weekly. In accordance with its guidelines, they must also distribute part of the produce to at-risk members. The rest is sold commercially to Brazilian distributors.
As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, commercial trading was suspended on March 27 last year to ensure the two tonnes of monthly produce feed as many struggling local families as possible.
‘Today I live from this farm,’ said Dias, the farmer. ‘Given that we are a poor community with countless socioeconomic problems – where access to proper sanitation, employment and education is often a struggle – our daily lives are always a fight. But thank God we have managed to survive this pandemic. This farm has kept our community alive.’
Social tools
The employees also believe the educational and social tools provided by the farm are just as important as the production itself.
‘This farm fell from the sky. It has meant that my family has not gone hungry this year,’ 69-year-old Diane da Silva, a farmworker and grandmother who has worked on the site since 2013, told Al Jazeera. Given that many women in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas often support their families alone, she said her family might not still be standing had it not been for the project…..”
View the whole story here: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/6/food-security-is-security-brazil-urban-farm-success-story