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Rio's urban gardens produce healthy food for the poor
Gun-toting youths watch over a street in a Rio de Janeiro slum hit hard by drug trafficking, but walk a bit further and you will find the largest urban vegetable garden in Latin America.
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Workers harvest vegetables from an urban garden to sell in the Manguinhos favela, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 6, 2022. (AFP/Andre Borges)
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un-toting youths watch over a street in a Rio de Janeiro slum hit hard by drug trafficking, but walk a bit further and this rough area also boasts the largest urban vegetable garden in Latin America.
This success story is unfolding in a favela called Manguinhos in the north of Rio, and thrives as the rest of the country frets over rampant inflation and worries over Russian fertilizer, a major concern for Brazil's powerful agriculture sector.
The first seed was planted in late 2013 on a parcel of land known then as "crackolandia" because it was home to so many drug addicts.
And little by little it has established itself and come to be respected in a neighborhood where drug traffickers are in charge.
These days the garden feeds some 800 families a month with produce that is pesticide free and affordable, two features that do not always go hand in hand.
"Why do poor people have to be doomed to eating poisoned food? My goal is to stop organic food from just being for the elite," Julio Cesar Barros, one of the managers of the garden, told AFP, alluding to high priced fruit and vegetables sold in wealthy neighborhoods like Copacabana and Ipanema.
The Manguinhos garden is one of 56 in Rio that Barros launched with city authorities in 2006. And it has been praised by an international agreement called the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact as one of the best such systems in the world.
