Urban Farms or Urban Myths?
HISTORY SHOWS URBAN FARMS CAN FEED CITIES WHILE PROVIDING ECOLOGICAL SERVICES – Perhaps the revival of urban farming will lead not just to a diet for a small planet but a diet for smaller people?
Category: Food Systems
Ethiopian Group Garden Wins Support from City and Community
Gohe Group Garden distributes over 40,000 seedlings for free to promote home gardens and win the hearts and minds of the community. After several years of considerable success with animal husbandry, the city rewarded Gohe—the city’s only HIV support association—with a honey filtration system to begin bee keeping and open a new stream of income for members.
Vandana Shiva – Seeds of Humanity
Scientist and philosopher Vandana Shiva explains how “everything begins with seed,” and addresses the perils of patenting them. Shiva, who founded a movement in India to promote native seeds, links genetic tinkering to problems in our ecology, economy, and humanity, and sees this as the latest battleground in the war on Planet Earth.
Food is the Solution, Deep Food is Our Weapon
The colonizer’s food is slowly killing us. Food is the weapon of self-destruction the colonizer placed in our hands and sells us at the Super-Size Me fast food joints and convenience marts.
But food is also the solution. It is our tool for liberation, health, and spiritual healing. Deep food is our weapon – the means to move toward autonomy and the renewal of a living traditional community.
Mapping the land grab in Africa
Corporations, governments, even universities are enclosing indigenous territories. For the past two years we have been tracking the voracious land grab that is unfolding across much of the two-thirds world including Africa, Asia, and South America. These new enclosures are a destructive force associated with the plague of globalization and its marshaling and disciplining rationale of neoliberalism with its panacea of free trade and privatization.
Urban Gardeners Defy the Desert in Northern Ethiopia
Water is scarce in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray. There is little difference between the dry and wet seasons, common in the tropics and the rest of Ethiopia. Usually by January, Tigray’s many villages dry up and become nests of desperation while families as well as the farmers depend on a series of small streams and wells.
Harvest of Pride
Hispanics suffer more hunger than any other group in the US and on June 2, 2012, a group of over 100 gathered in Eugene, Oregon to celebrate services that have helped Hispanic families feed themselves. University of Oregon graduate student Chris Roddy and filmmaker, highlights three projects of Huerto de la Familia/The Family Garden: organic family gardens, the Small Farmers Project, and the Micro Enterprise Project.
From Garbage to Garden
Sometimes when Samson Aberra is working in the garden, planting seedlings or replenishing his nursery, onlookers gather to watch him toil. What they don’t know is that Samson Aberra is not “toiling” — he’s barely working. In fact, he is doing what he loves: gardening. Samson’s garden lies next to the main highway running through the Ethiopian highland town of Dessie, located in the northeast of the country. The garden forms a triangle between the main road and a contaminated stream that meanders through the city in its journey to the low lying plains below.