Food Security In Our Backyards

Small, resilient agricultural solutions that will save the environment and feed generations to come.

- Rehana Dada

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF LAND REMAINS ONE OF the foremost solutions to poverty, and the methods used to fully benefit from farming are easily accessible and implementable.

Thankfully, there are proven ecologically-sound farming methods that contribute to household food security even in harsh landscapes, and even through droughts, as this group of women in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province have shown Strong El Niño events worldwide perpetually cause severe crop failures across the agricultural spectrum. Yet, in Igwavuma in KwaZulu-Natal, while her neighbor’s fields lay barren, Rhoda Mvubu was still harvesting cowpeas, sorghum, sesame, peanuts and a variety of beans at the end of the 2016 summer; and sweet potatoes and pumpkins in the winter. In the dry, rocky hills of Tshaneni, Doris Myeni was still harvesting vegetables and greens from her home garden late into a drought, enabling her to provide adequately for her extended family of 15 throughout the summer holidays. And Corinne Mngomezulu still had a good stock of seed saved from her own crops, stored well to protect them from insects and decay, ensuring that she would be able to plant again when the rains came.

All three women are part of a network of smallholder farmers in the north-eastern province of South Africa who are supported by a non-profit organization, Biowatch South Africa, to develop and implement agroecology practices on their plots. Along with about 250 other farmers, mainly women, they have improved the nutrition levels in their homes and produced enough for sale to neighbors and at markets, while increasing and maintaining the productivity and ecological sustainability of their farms.