Today, all over the developed world, important parts of the population are combating the economic crisis and in particular the food crisis by switching to production of fresh food. Produced at home, even in the smallest quantities, this “own fresh food” plays a considerable role in the well-being of families, in particular of children. Container gardening, vertical gardening, bottle towers, gardening on risers, balconies or windowsills, hydroponics, aquaponics, gardening in self-watering buckets, bags, sacks, crates, boxes, pots, guerilla gardening, edible forests, …, it are all different initiatives taken to alleviate hunger and malnutrition problems.
Day after day, messages and photos or videos on the internet confirm that people feel the need to produce their own fresh food, even in the smallest available space, e.g. a balcony on the 17th floor in the city. It is marvelous to notice that most of these “novice farmers or gardeners” proudly announce the successes of their first experiments and the swift progress made thanks to “lessons learned” and “exchange of information”.
Thanks to these personal initiatives of private gardening, the most vulnerable part of the population in developed countries is less affected by the food crisis, in particular by the high food prices.
Therefore, I feel the need to formulate a very simple question :
“If a large group of people in developed countries, affected by the actual crises and suffering from hunger or malnutrition because of the high food prices, is successfully setting up actions to produce an important part of their own food, why don’t we teach the billion hungry people, mostly living in developing countries, to do the same ?”.
The answer to this question seems to be a very difficult one.
My Chinese friends are telling me : “Don’t bring that hungry man a fish that he will eat in one day, but teach him how to fish and he will eat all year long“.
As Chinese is not my mother tongue, I translated it into : “Don’t bring the hungry people rations of nutritious food that they will eat in one day, but teach them how to grow their own fresh food and they will eat all year long”.
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Purely by coincidence I found today these 3 publications confirming that food production has become a very hot topic all over the world. Please read :
and
Captions of photos :
- “By growing different vegetables, Ainob Bibi is able to supply her own family and earn money”
- “Sack gardening does not require much space”
- “Sack gardening has also empowered women, who most often organise and take care of the gardens”
and
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