Regenerative urban agriculture in Teresina (BR) as a tool to build food sovereignty among urban farmers’ communities

Resumen

If modernization pushed millions of people from the countryside to the cities, where they started to live in slums and outskirts and perform low-paid productive activities, there are some locations worldwide where urban agriculture experiences have subverted this logic. Teresina, Brazil, is the case to be studied in this research. In the late 1980s, the municipal government responded to the impoverishment of the population who migrated from rural areas through a community farms program (Teresina, 2019). The program uses 108 hectares of public land in urban farms, where low-income and unemployed families can produce and sell vegetables, especially women, who joined the program to increase their household income. As they started earning their own money, they became less dependent on their husbands’ income and more financially empowered (Teresina, 2019). However, despite being numerous and well-distributed geographically in the urban territory, most of the community farms in Teresina still have low productivity, compromising the sustainability of the public policy and the income of the families that carry out this activity. Currently, the 42 urban gardens cannot reduce Teresina’s heavy dependence on the foreign market since 94% of all vegetables sold in the city’s main supply centre come from other states (Teresina, 2019).

This research has two main objectives. The first one is to explain how urban agriculture in Teresina challenges, underlies and/or reproduces neoliberal global food system rationalities, especially the understanding of nature as a resource to be exploited (Lawrence, G., & Smith, K., 2020). The second one is to explore how regenerative urban farming, as practices with no or positive socio and environmental impact (Newton, P., et al, 2020), can build food sovereignty in vulnerable communities in Teresina.

Recently, some groups of farmers started transitioning to more sustainable agriculture practices, such as organic farming and agroecology. Their motivation should be further studied, but it includes an expected added value to the final product, increased food security among farmers’ families and even more climate resilience, as Teresina is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. As the local temperature rises and the average humidity decreases, urban farming in Teresina is becoming increasingly challenging, pushing younger people away. At the same time, it is an indispensable strategy to ensure the resilience of several families. It is worth highlighting that this transition has been led by older women, who are holders of traditional knowledge at risk of disappearing without being passed on to newer generations. Teresina is one of many places where this phenomenon can be observed. Agroforestry projects in Hawaii (USA), urban farming in Havana (Cuba) and Accra (Ghana), and women-led projects in Kampala (Uganda) are other potential cases to be highlighted and used for comparison.

The research proposal departs from the abovementioned context to ask: in a context of overlapping social and environmental vulnerabilities and economic inequality, how can urban farming in Teresina challenge current neoliberal food systems’ rationalities and build local food sovereignty?

Palabras clave: food systems; urban agriculture; climate crisis; food sovereignty; urban resilience

References:

Lawrence, G., & Smith, K. (2020). Neoliberal Globalization and Beyond: Food, Farming, and the Environment. The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology, 411 – 428. 

Newton, P., Civita, N., Frankel-Goldwater, L., Bartel, K., & Johns, C. (2020). What Is Regenerative Agriculture? A Review of Scholar and Practitioner Definitions Based on Processes and Outcomes. , 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.577723.

Teresina (2019). Relatório Stadslab Master Class 2019 Teresina Mulheres pelo Clima | Women for Climate. Prefeitura Municipal de Teresina. Disponible en: https://issuu.com/teresina2030/docs/relat_rio_mulheres_pelo_clima__final_version_