24 September 2002

ARGENTINA'S GROWTH FROM ADVERSITY - ECOLOGIST ARTICLE

Once the darling of South America, Argentina is in total meltdown. But now the people of Buenos Aires are taking matters into their own hands...

EXCERPT: agribusiness organisations... are 'donating' large amounts of soya (nearly all of which is genetically modified) and carrying out campaigns for that soya to replace meat and milk in the regular diets of low-income households and schools.

While such food handouts may alleviate hunger in the immediate term, they tend to reinforce passivity and dependence on the government, private agribusiness and, ultimately, the GM seed monopolies. They introduce GM food into the diets of consumers who are denied any choice or information, in disregard of the long-term safety or desirability of such foods.

But the activists in the huerta movement are clear that they are no longer willing to wait for hand-outs from the same politicians they are marching to remove. Nor do they want to place themselves in the hands of agribusiness, which is widely seen as having plundered the country. For these people, the vegetable gardens hold out the hope of genuine food security and a measure of control over everyday life.

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GROW YOUR OWN DEMOCRACY

The Ecologist, Vol. 32 No. 8, October 2002

Buenos Aires is one of Latin America's oldest and largest cities. Some 13 million people live in the greater Buenos Aires area, three million of them within the city limits. Built on a grand scale in the late 19th century by architects trying to emulate the Paris of Baron Hausman, and studded with concrete tower blocks added by later generations, the Argentine capital looks like most of its European counterparts - only a little more run-down.

It is all the more strange, then, to see vegetable allotments springing up in the corner of a public park in the neighbourhood of San Cristóbal just 10 minutes by bus from the city centre. Hundreds of kids regularly play football on the adjacent public pitches, and the park is surrounded on three sides by apartment blocks and by the city‚s main paediatric hospital on the other. Staring down grimly on the whole scene is the futuristic nightmare of Caseros Prison - built by the military dictatorship during the late 1970s and now abandoned to the rats.

The vegetable garden is about 500 square metres in size, and is organised in not quite straight strips - each about a metre wide. A group of neighbours campaigned for permission to set it up in a little used corner of the park. Now they are providing food for some of the many soup kitchens that have been set up locally in response to the current economic depression.

Constructing and maintaining the garden has been a struggle for the 20 or so regulars who work the land. Many times, plants were destroyed during the night. Stray dogs caused much damage, as did a local group of kids who had been used to taking drugs on a cluster of park benches nearby. Now the lot is protected by fencing scrounged from a variety of sources, and the local kids have become cautiously friendly now they realise that the participants in the vegetable garden will not call the police every time they have a get-together.

If you had asked a porteño, or Buenos Aires citizen, even a couple of years ago whether they would ever be growing their own food they would doubtless have thought you crazy. Although Argentina had suffered decades of stop-go economic dislocation and political violence, its people were still, on the whole, better off than other Latin Americans. Buenos Aires‚ large middle class had remained pretty much intact.

This is no longer the case. Unemployment - already high in the 1990s - has grown to about 25 per cent. More than 50 per cent of Argentines now live below the poverty line. With unemployment benefits and social security almost non-existent, many people have been thrown back on their own resources to survive.

HOME-GROWN ECONOMICS

There are now around 450,000 huertas or vegetable gardens in Argentina. Most of them have emerged since the mid-1990s. The average size of the huertas is 100 square metres for family-run plots, 200 square metres for schools and 1,000 square metres for community plots. Around 2.5 million people receive some food from the plots, and there are now more than 5,600 school plots and 2,300 community plots. The combined yield of the 4,000 hectares of vegetable gardens is around 80,000 tons per year. This is growing rapidly.

For a number of years the government has cautiously supported this explosion in the number of huertas - seeing it as a way of relieving pressure on social spending. Nationally, there is a plan called Prohuerta, which provides technical support to the vegetable gardens through promotors from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA). Prohuerta also oversees the distribution of seeds to the huertas. The INTA technicians attempt to work entirely without agri-chemicals, using organic methods instead. One of their latest schemes is to set up vegetable gardens in conjunction with local parent-teacher associations. The aim is to train children to run the plots independently and provide food for their school canteens.  On the whole, the Prohuerta plan has operated in provincial towns and the sprawling suburban belt surrounding Buenos Aires. Most of the schemes have functioned in private gardens and plots of land.

Now, however, with the lurch of Argentina's economy into yet deeper crisis, the huertas have begun to proliferate in the very heart of metropolitan Buenos Aires. They have also taken on a much greater political significance. Their most active proponents are neighbourhood associations linked to the "Kick them all out" movement that overthrew two presidents at the end of 2001, and the strongly anti-government unemployed piquetero organisations. The militant Unemployed Workers‚ Movement (MTD) runs a series of large vegetable gardens in the southern and western suburbs of Buenos Aires. These provide food to the MTD’s own network of supporters and communal canteens. Many other organisations run similar schemes.

Both the neighbourhood assemblies and the unemployed groups put a strong emphasis on the autonomy that the huertas allow them to achieve from the government. They also emphasise the huertas‚ co-operative, self-managed nature. The most radicalised participants go one step further. They see the vegetable gardens as an embryonic form of organisation for a new society based on the principles of self-sufficiency and community-based direct democracy.

In the Parque Patricios district of Buenos Aires I meet Pepe, an unemployed carpenter who is digging with his neighbours a new garden on unused public land. Some of Pepe‚s fellow activists are squatting a nearby building. "We have millions of unemployed people and plenty of land," Pepe declares. "So, why should we ask the government for anything?"

Throughout Buenos Aires activists have sought to appropriate land on which to install the vegetable gardens. The gardeners have targeted unused private or government land, or, where necessary, under-utilised public spaces such as areas of public parks.

THE THREAT OF DEMOCRACY

Local government has an ambiguous attitude to the huertas. Many local councils see them as a way of relieving pressure for food hand-outs or plan-trabajar ("work plan") and "heads-of-family" subsidies. Local politicians often figure they would rather have community activists working down at the vegetable garden than showing up on the doorstep.

But many other local politicians see the huertas as a direct threat - particularly if they spring up as a result of land occupations of idle private property or they encroach on areas earmarked for long-stalled government projects. As a result, the authorities often threaten eviction in the event of land seizure or try and use divide-and-rule tactics.

In the northern Buenos Aires suburb of Saavedra, for instance, the local neighbourhood assembly occupied a piece of land and began to sow vegetables there. The response of the local government was to award the plot to a local group of cartoneros - people who eke out a living collecting paper and cardboard from the streets and selling it for recycling. The idea was to cause a conflict between the two groups. Luckily, the cartoneros and huerta activists have been able to reconcile their needs and agree to use the land together - at least for now.

On a national level, the federal government is keen for local organisation to remain within "clientelistic" frameworks - the traditional mainstay for political parties such as president Eduardo Duhalde’s Justicialista Party. On the one hand, this involves trying to make sure that people carry out local activities through the framework of local government and the local party committees. On the other, it entails maintaining and promoting distribution networks for government-controlled food hand-outs.

Many of these distribution networks work hand in hand with agribusiness organisations that are "donating" large amounts of soya (nearly all of which is genetically modified) and carrying out campaigns for that soya to replace meat and milk in the regular diets of low-income households and schools.

While such food handouts may alleviate hunger in the immediate term, they tend to reinforce passivity and dependence on the government, private agribusiness and, ultimately, the GM seed monopolies. They introduce GM food into the diets of consumers who are denied any choice or information, in disregard of the long-term safety or desirability of such foods.

But the activists in the huerta movement are clear that they are no longer willing to wait for hand-outs from the same politicians they are marching to remove. Nor do they want to place themselves in the hands of agribusiness, which is widely seen as having plundered the country. For these people, the vegetable gardens hold out the hope of genuine food security and a measure of control over everyday life. "This way," says Pepe, "we don’t have to ask anybody’s permission to eat."

Ben Backwell lives and works in Buenos Aires as a freelance journalist.