THE COUNTRY | Manizales
Beans, corn, cabbage and Creole potatoes are grown by Gloria Omaira Cifuentes in conjunction with five neighbors who took a plot of land near their homes, in the Bengala neighborhood, to grow healthy food. They began in October of last year, when SENA offered them a workshop on urban agriculture and since then they have not stopped harvesting.
Yalile García, in charge of the workshop structured by SENA, explains that this is a program that has been carried out since 2017 and focuses on the food sovereignty of the communities so that food, in addition to being grown by themselves, is healthy and can reduce, in the long term, the concentration of CO2 in the city.
“That year we brought together a group of people and, with them, we created the Network of sovereign farmers of Manizales. Right now we have more than 200 people, some of them victims of the conflict, who have found a motivation for life in sowing. We teach sowing techniques, pest management through biopreparations or allelopathy, so that the garden is totally organic ”, added García.
For both Yalile and Gloria Omaira, ancestral knowledge cannot be lost. That is why they concentrate their days on teaching and learning various techniques and crops that make time more bearable. “We hold meetings, we plan the crops and treatments for the land. All the members of the garden in Bengal come from the countryside and we continue to grow in the city because that gives us peace of mind and puts food produced with our hands on the table ”, concluded Gloria Omaira.
The Mayor’s Office sows
Since the beginning of March, the Rural Development Unit of the Mayor’s Office of Manizales began the “Urban Agriculture” program. According to the director of this entity, Carlomán Londoño Llano, the initiative took force as a result of the pandemic, as people feel the need to use their free time and forgotten spaces.
Londoño Llano explained: “We want that in each of the communes a demonstration model of an urban garden is developed that can be replicated by families and communities. This is a comprehensive program as it offers economic solutions since families can sell part of their crops; social since it reduces the exposure to mental and environmental pathologies, because when aromatic plants, vegetables and greens are planted in a massive way there is a contribution to the capture of CO2 ”.
This program of the Mayor’s Office is due to a global trend of community gardens and for this reason, from the Rural Development Unit, they plan to turn Manizales into a national example of urban agriculture. “In the near future we want to start working on a public policy focused on this. We want that, in a few years, the motivation to grow their own food remains in the DNA of Manizaleños ”, Londoño Llano added.
–
