Mexico City looks for food crisis solution in families' backyards

Mexico’s mayor Marcelo Ebrard has adopted policies which provide support for small farmers within the Mexico City municipal area. Households are given technical support and seeds, jumpstarting food production at a time of rising food bills. As the program director puts it, “We get them to provide the land and the labour and we provide everything else.”

It’s a good idea, albeit rather obvious at a time like this – and has been prefigured by far more ambitious policies in Cuba along similar lines. Ironically, it also recalls the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, which in some ways took the form of an enormous market garden, replete with miles of canals, raised gardens (chinampas) and a sophisticated urban market system.

Mexico City, one of the world’s most populous and polluted metropolitan areas, is working on its own solution to the rapidly rising cost of food: grow your own.

Led by Marcelo Ebrard, the city’s leftwing mayor, the local governmenthas decided to expand a “backyard agriculture programme” launched last year to encourage the capital’s residents to use all available space to grow crops.

“We want to make people realise that they can use their gardens, yards and roof terraces to grow food,” says Adolfo López Villanueva, the programme’s director. “With the climate we have in Mexico City you can get between two and three harvests a year and that would help families keep costs down.”

The programme was launched last year. But the spiralling cost of food has given new impetus to plans for its expansion and this year officials have decided to increase its scope by at least 50 per cent.

Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.