Plight of urban farmers to ensure food security continues

URBAN farmers said they continued to struggle to ensure food security but were now better prepared than when the first Covid-19 restrictions were implemented last year.

The City’s Agricultural Training Programme, with 720 urban farmer participants to address food security in communities, also resumed.

Urban management mayoral committee member Grant Twigg said they revised the initial Urban Agriculture Training Programme to adhere to the current alert level 4 Covid-19 regulations.

“With the disturbing scenes of civil unrest and the total disregard for the law under the guise of unemployment and poverty, urban farming is beneficial to society,,” said Twigg.

Greenlight Food Garden Project farmer Clifford Caesar said although the programme provided much needed assistance to grow crops and ensure the sustainability of their gardens, urban farmers still faced many challenges to ensure food security.

Caesar said, even before lockdown was implemented, urban farmers faced many challenges – despite efforts to engage the City to implement an Urban Agriculture Policy.

“Access to land is the main challenge. Even though there are a lot of open spaces that farmers can use, the City would rather allow these open spaces to be used as dumping sites and waste money cleaning up after.

“Support for our projects is another challenge, as we try to farm in an organic way to look after the soil, seedlings and compost, but input costs are expensive and come out of our own pockets. We can't earn a living wage under the current situation,” said Caesar.

Hanover Park Agriculture and Greening Forum secretary and agriculturalist Jeremy Martin said access and irrigation was another pressing concern.

“The Cape Flats has one of the world’s largest aquifers, and it is currently only being accessed by a few big commercial farmers on the Cape flats,” said Martin.

Caesar said, as long as urban farmers were refused a say in decision making, nothing would change.