Urban Farming Grows in Brazil as Food Prices Jump

"RIO DE JANEIRO -- As a teenager in the Manguinhos slum community in northern Rio de Janeiro, Leonardo Ferreira said he used to spend his mornings packaging cocaine when he wasn't taking part in shootouts with the police.

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 sanctions on Russia, are leading ordinary people to grow more of their own food.

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.

"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. 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.

"The arrival of the pandemic, the lack of jobs and a difficulty to buy food has only propelled these projects," said Mariella Uzeda, 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.

The gardens have encouraged people to eat a wider range of vegetables, 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." [1]

1. World News: Urban Farming Grows in Brazil as Food Prices Jump
Pearson, Samantha. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 13 Sep 2022: A.16.