Catherine Sasman
13 May 2008
Windhoek — Localised food systems - in the emergent food price crisis - would allow people to grow nutrition, income and economies starting at the household level to regional level. But people have to take ownership of such projects, New Era reports.
"The growing of a carrot is an act of liberation," says Ottilié Abrahams from behind her office desk at the Jacob Marengo Secondary School in Katutura, where she is working as the principal of a school established by a civil society organisation in the early 1980s.
Abrahams is reflecting on gardening projects - also started in the early 1980s - in primarily the south of Namibia that have since fallen apart.
But with prohibitive food prices, such projects may need to be revisited to allow especially marginalised families the opportunity to provide themselves with nutritional food.
The annual price of food has increased by 15.6 percent, reported the Bank of Namibia earlier in the year. On a global scale, world food prices have risen 45 percent in the last nine months with serious shortages of rice, wheat and maize reported. The price of rice, for example, has gone up by 76 percent between December last year and April, with prices expected to maintain relatively high levels, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said.
The food price crisis is said to have been triggered by a triple threat: bio-fuel production supplanting food production; a devastating drought in wheat-producing Australia; and increased adverse global warming effects on flood and drought conditions.
This has prompted the World Bank to express its support for a 'green revolution' in sub-Saharan Africa, saying that it would double its lending rates for agriculture in Africa from US$450 million to US$800 million over three years.
For Abrahams and other activists around the globe, the answer may be more in localised gardening initiatives.
A growing phenomenon, said Michel Pimbert in his publication, Towards Food Sovereignty, the prime movers behind a newly emerging food sovereignty policy framework are civil society, indigenous people and new social movements.
"At its heart, this alternative policy framework for food and agriculture aims to guarantee and protect people's space, ability and right to define their own models of production, food distribution and consumption patterns," said Pimbert.
The concept of 'food sovereignty' is to be understood as a "transformative process that seeks to recreate the democratic realm and regenerate a diversity of autonomous food systems based on equity, social justice and ecological sustainability", Pimbert continued.
"Food sovereignty is the right of people to define their own food and agriculture; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self-reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets; and to provide local fisheries-based communities as the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources," he said.
He goes on to say that this does, however, not negate trade, but rather promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the right of people to food and to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production.
The southern Namibian example of food growing projects, said Abrahams, is indeed a challenge of creating a democratic culture.
"When we returned to Namibia [after a long period in exile, and returning in 1978] we saw reports of people [in the south] eating cattle fodder, and people living there told us that places like Berseba, Drieling and Abrahamspos along the Fish River were previously being cultivated," remembers Abrahams.
"We decided to go there to see what was happening. What I found very traumatic in Berseba was that the people were hungry, but there was a steady stream of water for grass. I looked at the grass and thought that if that can grow there, then why not food?"
A nation-building project was established with the express aim to be conducted with the maximum participation from people where the project was taken.
"The main thing at the time was to start community projects based on participatory democracy," she says.
After extensive discussions with community members, committees were established, and people could decide what they had wanted to plant, whether they wanted to rear goats or sheep, and how they wanted to do all of this.
The methods to grow vegetables - or to create food gardens - was simple, doable and affordable.
Growing Food Gardens
The ensuing project was the Growing Food in Times of Drought, with an essential link with the South Africa-based Food Gardens Unlimited.
The basic idea, says Abrahams, is to grow multiple vegetables on a size of land equal to the size of four standard doors.
A typical one-door sized patch of land of one metre by two metres would, for example, be able to yield six or seven different vegetables such as cabbage, lettuce, Swiss chard, carrot and radish, bush beans, turnips and spring onions planted on rows 15 centimetres apart.
The planting can be adopted for different areas and seasons to provide vegetables year-round.
Food gardens, she said, are easy, cheap and productive, and can form part of the lifestyle of a community, a village, or individual gardens.
To make it even cheaper, the golden rule is to feed the soil with animal bones, feathers, organic remainders from the kitchen, dead leaves, ashes from a fire considered to be an excellent food feed - only if it is six months old. Old, shredded newspapers - which are biodegradable - can also be used in the compost.
In places where there are water shortages, garden rows can be watered from used bath water, or even dishwashing water.
The hydroponics project in Katutura is also increasingly becoming a popular method to grow vegetables.
This was a project introduced as a pilot project by the Ministry of Agriculture and FAO office in Windhoek.
This method allows for small-scale, intensive agricultural projects in urban and peri-urban areas, and is equally ideal for projects in rural areas, using the minimal amount of space, water and other resources. And it is a very affordable method where reusable materials are used to create a one-square metre crop bed for a multiple crop yield.
The project is currently run by the Ministry of Youth, National Service, Sport and Culture and trai-ning is provided to organisations, youth and individuals in Windhoek and Ondangwa.
Dorothea Shiningayamwe, a rural youth officer with the ministry, said training is also provided in horticulture and micro-gardening.
The aim of the hydroponics project is to improve the diet of mostly vulnerable groups, as well as to create an opportunity for people to generate an income.
The (Global) Challenge for Food Gardening
According to Pimbert, while there are still diverse local food systems, and while most of the food is grown and collected by over 2.5 billion small-scale farmers, these are largely ignored, neglected and "actively undermined" by governments and big corporations.
"First, the global restructuring of agri-food systems and livelihoods threatens such 'autonomous spaces' [referring to a mode of existence where a social group or nation defines its own needs and limits of its own development] as a few transnational corporations gain monopoly control over different links in the food chain," said Pimbert.
Second, he said, much of the millennium development community sees development as a process where there is a reduction of people involved in farming, fishing and land- and water-based livelihoods.
"Regaining autonomous food systems - with, for and by citizens - is a key challenge in this context. Reclaiming such spaces for autonomy and well-being depends on strengthening the positive features of local food systems and on large-scale citizen action grounded in an alternative theory of social change," said Pimbert.
In Namibia, the challenge for localised food production is more familiar.
"People don't understand the impact of the colonial mentality," says Abrahams of the projects that have collapsed in the south once main protagonists left people to their own devices after years of groundwork that had been prepared for the projects to be able to run by the local people.
"People thought independence was going to bring them certain things. They sat back and waited for others to come and tell them what to do," she says.
"It made me realise that democracy is not a joke. It takes a lot of energy and effort. It is also important to understand that unless Namibia is food-independent, we are never going to be truly independent."
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