BRAZIL – In Curitiba, in the south of Brazil, at the initiative of the community hundreds of gardens were created in abandoned areas and provide food for hundreds of people. In the period of capitalist modernity in which nature is one of the areas most affected by exploitation and destruction in pursuit of profit, popular and ecological alternatives are needed and developed in all parts of the world.
A community garden can be urban, suburban, or rural. It can grow flowers, vegetables—or community. It can be one community plot or many individual plots. It can be located at a school, hospital, or in a neighborhood. Another way of thinking about community gardens are as “community-managed open spaces.” These differ from a park or public space where some other entity ultimately decides the purpose of the site and maintains it. Community gardens are where the residents of a community are empowered to design, build, and maintain spaces in the community.
In addition to popular struggles in the ecological line and in the search for sustainable and green alternatives for society, there are several initiatives at local levels. Among these initiatives is the design of existing communal gardens in Curitiba:
Horta do Jacu
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Community garden, public, biodiverse, agroforestry. Community compost bin for recycling raw vegetable food waste. Space for leisure, educational activities, sociability and food, cultural and artistic exchanges in the Bom Retiro neighborhood. Space for growing PANC (non-conventional food plants) and Creole seeds. Experimental environment of micro-urbanisms, urban furniture and participatory networks. Self-managed, non-commercial and non-governmental social experiment.
Horta do Jacu is located in a public lot on Rua Ângelo Zeni, almost on the corner of Albino Silva, Bom Retiro, Curitiba. The name of the garden is a tribute to the Jacu bird (Penelope obscura) seen on the land two days before its productive community occupation. It is also an affirmative action to value work and the rural worker, often pejoratively called “jacu” or “caipira” by city dwellers.
Parque Bom Retiro
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Citizenship action that proposes the creation of the Bom Retiro Park, in Curitiba, with the preservation of native forest and the three existing springs on the land where the Bom Retiro Psychiatric Hospital operated for 67 years. The activist movement is articulated on the internet by the community on Facebook “A causa Mais Bonita da Cidade”. While debates were still going on about the possibility of making the property a historic landmark, the building was hastily demolished in 2012 by the new owner of the land, with a view to building another hypermarket in the neighborhood, an undertaking also contested by the movement: “We want a whole park, with no market in the quite”. Face-to-face actions were held on Sundays in front of the former hospital grounds. A petition with more than 12 thousand signatures was delivered to the City Hall in 2017.
I participated in some of the dozens of demonstrations that took place on Sundays in front of the old hospital grounds, including the first incursion of the collective movement to the site, on 08/27/2017, and the second public demonstration, on 09/07/2017, when I extended the banners “SOCIAL PRACTICES INTAURAM TERRITORIES” and “STRATEGIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE LIBERTARY PLACE”.
Escadaria Comestível das Mercês
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Another example is the creation of community gardens, which last month was the subject of controversy between residents and the City Hall of Curitiba — a situation that resulted in the regularization of planting and cultivation in spaces. It was from this provocation that the Escadaria Edível das Mercês emerged. The flower pots, which had been concreted for some time on the staircase, located on the corner of Avenida Manoel Ribas and Rua Raquel Prado, were reopened and received seedlings of different spices, such as parsley, marjoram, coriander and even fruits, such as Andean melon.
Ricardo de Campos Leinig, who was born and raised in the neighborhood, was one of those responsible for mobilizing the community to create the vegetable garden. A group of 22 people was formed on Facebook, all residents of the neighborhood, to keep the plantation healthy through daily care — which ended up bringing interested neighbors together.
Horta Comunitária de Calçada do Cristo Rei
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Active since 2016 in the gardening area of the sidewalk that flanks a quiet stretch of Rua Roberto Cichon, connected to the busy Linha Verde, in the Cristo Rei neighborhood.
The agro-ecological Community Garden of Calçada do Cristo Rei was the protagonist of a fundamental discussion about urban gardens in Curitiba in a clash with the City Hall that same year, when, based on a fine imposed by the Urban Planning Secretariat due to the use of the area with practices outside the conventional standards, urban gardeners began to argue against and claim the use of the grassy area of public sidewalks as a perspective for the implementation of vegetable gardens and biodiverse gardens, showing the many collective, urbanistic and ecological benefits involved. A joint effort of solidarity with Horta took place on 10-06-2017. A petition in support of Horta with almost 3,000 signatures was delivered to the City of Curitiba 07-07-2017. The debate reverberated strongly in the media, including national repercussions.
The initiative also received a prestigious international honor from the United Nations in 2017 with a certificate issued by the UN Food Gardens in which it recognizes the notable efforts of the members of the garden “to promote sustainable urban agriculture and contribute to food security and the well-being of your community”. The discussion not only spread in the public sphere, but also bore fruit, being the catalyst for a series of public hearings promoted by the Curitiba City Council, which resulted in the elaboration of the Urban Agriculture Law of Curitiba, enacted in 2018.
Mutirão na Aldeia Tupã Nhe’é Kretã
Aldeia Tupã Nhe’é Kretã is located in Serra do Mar, in Morretes, almost on the border with São José dos Pinhais, in an area overlapping with the Guaricana National Park. The current occupation was consolidated in the area in August 2014 and it is home to Mbyá Guarani, Kaingang and Xokleng indigenous people. Periodically, extra-community joint efforts take place in the village, with various activities aimed at improving the infrastructure of the local environment. In 2016, there were four joint efforts called by Xondaro Arte Indígena, an indigenous handicraft store located in Curitiba that articulates a national network of trade in indigenous products.
The participation of the City Hall after the initiative taken by the population
Municipal promotion of urban agriculture has existed in Curitiba since the 1980s and was directly related to land use planning. Over the past four decades, the activity has led to the occupation of empty or underutilized lots for the implementation of agricultural production units.
The Program encourages the creation of urban gardens in institutional spaces and public or private empty spaces for food production without the use of chemical inputs. The city hall performs the technical follow-up for the implementation of the gardens, the donation of inputs and the training of the agents involved.
Today, the municipality provides support through SMSAN’s Urban Agriculture Program to 100 urban gardens that occupy 157,500 square meters, including community spaces, schools and institutions (in homes for the elderly and support for dependents, for example). There are 5.7 thousand producers directly participating in the planting and 17.9 thousand people benefiting from food.
MST – Movimento Sem Terra Brasil
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The concentration of land in the hands of a few is a hallmark of the formation of Brazilian society. The latifundio is at the base of the Portuguese invasion of territory in our country. This form of land occupation and possession has generated, over the centuries, a profoundly unequal society. What happened to the native peoples who were persecuted and had their ancient territories stolen; to the millions of black people, who despite being freed with the abolition of slavery had their right to land denied; and to the millions of peasant families who migrated to Brazil with the promise of receiving land to produce, a promise that was never fulfilled.
The absence of a reform of the land structure in Brazil, even after the Federal Constitution of 1988, made the struggle for land the only possibility for millions of landless families to conquer a plot of land to survive and obtain their livelihood. The organization of landless families in the MST allowed the conquest and expropriation of large estates across the country, guaranteeing the creation of Agrarian Reform Settlements, which benefited around 400,000 families in Brazil.
Settlements are territories conquered by landless working families. They were unproductive, illegal landholdings, with environmental and/or labor crimes that, through struggle, were transformed into territory for the social reproduction of peasant families. Settled families mainly live, work and produce food, with food sovereignty as their main objective, that is, guaranteeing the production of healthy food, accessible to the Brazilian people, whether at the municipal, state or even national level. The settlers also socially recreate this territory through Rural Schools, popular health practices, community radio stations and popular culture in the municipalities, regions and states where we operate.
For this, cooperation is an elementary principle, exercised daily. Today MST have 160 cooperatives and 190 associations, which have 120 small and medium-sized agroindustries. These social enterprises operate at different levels, from production, agro-industrialization to food marketing. The maturation of these organizational forms led to the creation of Agrarian Reform production chains, with production in different states. The most consolidated production chains in MST settlements are rice, milk, meat, coffee, cocoa, seeds, cassava, sugar cane and grains. However, the diversity of food produced in each region of the country exceeds several hundred, supplying local and regional fairs, baskets and consumer cooperatives, local markets and, mainly, school meals and other public entities, such as nursing homes, prisons, barracks , etc.
In order to produce this diversity of food, the Landless families have been working to consolidate Agroecology in the settlements, based on new human-nature relationships, producing healthy ways of managing production while taking care of the common goods of the people (water , earth, biodiversity, air). More than 50,000 landless families currently implement agroecological practices.
