Soaring Food Prices in Brazil Lead Many to Take Up Urban Farming
In Brazil’s favelas, residents grow vegetables in large-scale community gardens, as inflation and supply-chain problems push more into hunger
By Samantha Pearson | Photographs by Dado Galdieri
Wall Street Journal
Sept. 12, 2022
(Must see. Mike)
Excerpt:
Now, he tends to his lettuce in the favela’s vast vegetable garden, one of thousands of urban farms that have sprung up across Brazil’s poorest communities, as residents from grandmothers to drug traffickers resort to growing their own food amid soaring prices.
“People are desperate. We sell the vegetables cheap to the locals at a fair on Fridays—it’s normally all gone within 30 minutes,” said Mr. Ferreira, 26, who swapped his assault rifle for a garden hose under pressure from his wife.
Wedged between makeshift homes on a strip of land the size of four soccer fields, the Manguinhos garden provides enough vegetables for as many as 800 families, say city officials, who assert it is the biggest in Latin America.
Urban agriculture is growing across many of the world’s megacities. Rampant inflation and bottlenecks of supplies like fertilizer, which began during the Covid-19 pandemic and were made worse by war in Ukraine, are leading ordinary people to grow more of their own food.
In India, Delhi announced plans in June to train tens of thousands of locals in how to grow vegetables on their rooftops. City farms have flourished in the poorest communities of Cape Town, South Africa. Indonesia’s agriculture ministry recently encouraged people to grow rice in their backyards. Even affluent Singapore has been squeezing high-tech vertical farms in between skyscrapers to reduce dependence on imported food.
But in Brazil—a country of 215 million where about 85% of people now live in urban areas—cities such as Rio are embarking on some of the most ambitious projects.
A 20-minute drive west, in the Madureira neighborhood, the city is building what it says will be the largest vegetable garden in the world by 2024 in a plot of land abandoned after the 2016 Olympics Games. The 27-acre lot will be capable of feeding some 50,000 families, according to the Rio government.
‘ We sell the vegetables cheap to the locals at a fair on Fridays—it’s normally all gone within 30 minutes ,’ says Leonardo Ferreira, a local resident of the Manguinhos slum community.Photo: Dado Galdieri for The Wall Street Journal
“The idea is to create a fertile city, a city that not only consumes food but produces it,” said Julio Cesar Barros, a government agronomist who runs the city’s Carioca Gardens program in Rio, where locals are known as Cariocas. Mr. Barros estimates that Rio is now home to as many as 400 community gardens, including 60 in the program.
Brazil, an agricultural superpower, produces about 10% of the world’s food, from beef to soybeans, orange juice to corn. But buying food is increasingly too expensive for the poorest families. About 33 million people are going hungry in Brazil, compared with about 19 million people at the end of 2020, according to the Brazilian research group Penssan.
Rio’s city hall provides locals with seeds, tools and a $100 monthly stipend to farm strips of land in the slum communities, requiring them to sell half the produce at cheap prices and donate the rest. Selling vegetables next to where they are grown cuts out transport costs, and with few expenses thanks to the government support, Manguinhos can sell lettuce and other produce at as little as a fifth of store prices.
Similar projects have taken root across Brazil’s other major cities, such as Belo Horizonte and São Paulo.
In Paraisópolis, one of São Paulo’s biggest favelas, a vegetable garden that opened in 2020 using hydroponics—allowing plants to grow vertically without soil—can produce almost 700 pounds of vegetables in two months. A vast vegetable garden also has flourished downtown on the grounds of a former tax-authority building, occupied by a left-wing movement that lays claim to abandoned buildings to house the homeless.
“The arrival of the pandemic, the lack of jobs and a difficulty to buy food has only propelled these projects,” said Mariella Uzêda, a researcher at Brazil’s state-run agricultural agency Embrapa.
When Mr. Barros cooked up the Carioca Gardens program in 2006, Rio’s main objective was to stop families from building shacks on unused land. The gardens soon became havens for locals eager to escape the gangs and militias that dominate most of Rio’s more than 1,000 favelas.
These days, gang members largely welcome the new gardens. But there is often tension. Every few weeks, the military police storm Manguinhos at dawn, battling local gang members who fight back with a tirade of bullets and the occasional grenade.
The plants go unwatered on those mornings.
A volunteer gardener washing harvested greens before sending them to a street fair in Manguinhos.Photo: Dado Galdieri for The Wall Street Journal
Gang leaders in Manguinhos also paved over some of the lettuce to create more space for the favela’s popular outdoor funk parties, known as Baile Funk, Mr. Barros said.
On a recent visit to Madureira, the onetime Olympics site, a bare-chested man whom locals identified as the local gang leader walked up to Mr. Barros to berate him for what he said was slow progress on the vegetable garden.
“It’s going to be the biggest, we’re going to be in the Guinness Book of Records, right?” the man said. “Right,” Mr. Barros replied nervously.
The gardens have encouraged people to eat a wider range of vegetables, including some plants that aren’t found in supermarkets and that many residents didn’t know were edible, such as the hairy leaves of the Goldfish plant and small red Capuchin flowers. Agronomists say some also offer medicinal benefits.
But many of the favela’s residents couldn’t care less if the vegetables are organic or particularly nutritious. They say they just want enough to eat.
In Rio’s Rocinha favela, Flávio Gomes set up vegetable gardens on the concrete roofs of neighbors’ homes. He began in 2017, using everything from barrels to discarded broken fridges as planters, using know-how he learned on an uncle’s farm as a boy.
In the past couple of weeks, he has begun working with Rio’s Rural Federal University to install rooftop vegetable gardens on another 50 homes, allowing families to not only feed themselves but also grow a little extra to sell as a cooperative.
“There are entire families going hungry,” he said. “We’re doing what we can.”
