Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Urban agriculture in Managua: Gender, private spaces and
community efforts
The results of this study indicate that food production in San Augusto is
primarily a household activity and is limited to the cultivation of fruit trees
and shade-tolerant crops such as herbs and chillies.
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There was a limited
amount of community-based agricultural practices, most of which were
informal. At a formal level, the O
ce of Women for the City of Managua, in
collaboration with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization
(FAO), was involved in several school-garden pilot projects to produce
organic vegetables for school kitchens. Other school-garden projects were also
being implemented by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (El
Ministerio de Educacio´ n, Cultura y Deportes, MECD) and the Emergency
Social Investment Fund (Fondo de Inversio´ n Social de Emergencia, FISE).
Most efforts to promote UA focus on the scale of the household. FISE,
jointly with FAO and the Institute of Aquaculture Technology (Instituto de
Tecnologı´ a Agropecuaria, INTA), distributed 24,000 tomato seedlings to 300
families in nine barrios, together with tools and fertilizer (Guerrero, 2005; R.
Ramirez, FISE representative, 12 November 2005, personal interview). The
objective was to encourage households to grow tomatoes for household
consumption. If this is successful, the project may expand to incorporate other
food crops. Another household project was FUNDECI's huertos familiares,
which also sought to encourage the establishment of home gardens to assist in
enhancing food security and nutrition. However, at the end of FUNDECI's
project, participants stated that while they were interested in growing food
crops in their individual patios, they did not want to change the composition
of trees and ornamentals. Growing food crops that FUNDECI and others
promoted would have meant reducing the shade in their patios, consequently
diminishing the aforementioned benefits. Thus, many participants commented
that having a community-driven effort would have been more successful and
beneficial to them.
C
ONCLUSION AND
R
ECOMMENDATIONS
Gender differences are critical to how UA is carried out and the benefits it
produces (Anosike, 2004; Hovorka, 2005, 2006). This study corroborates these
authors' findings, showing that men and women have distinct relationships
with their environment in the plants they identified and their socio-ecological
networks. These varying relationships influence the composition of patios and
the extent to which men and women interact with their immediate and
surrounding environments. In San Augusto, urban agro-forestry in household
patios was the main UA system, and was produced through a diversity of
socio-ecological networks (friends, family, strangers, private and public space)
and exchanges (monetary, planting materials and harvest exchanges). These
networks play an important role in the production of patio gardens, and the
