How home gardens are saving people money

DW (English)

Climate change, the war in Ukraine and the effects of COVID-19 are contributing to rising food prices. Growing fruit and vegetables instead of buying them could be the answer. In Johannesburg, urban agriculture projects are teaching locals how to garden.

Transcript

00:00 Nestled up to the high-rise offices of downtown Johannesburg lies Lawrenceville, but it's

00:07 no high-income neighborhood. In South Africa, food prices rose by 14 percent this year,

00:13 and residents here are barely screeping by.

00:17 Every day is hard. Sometimes they rot, and as you can see, the green peppers. I see last

00:21 time, I usually buy the box 35 rand. Last week I go there, I see the box, it was 75

00:27 rand.

00:27 As long as the petrol is going up, the food will surely go up. The food will surely go

00:32 up. So hey, managing nowadays, we have to cut.

00:36 One way out of the predicament could be urban agriculture. The Victoria Yards precinct in

00:42 Lawrenceville is just one example of what could be possible in Johannesburg. At this

00:47 revamped industrial site, Matsupiso Makabane wants to motivate urban dwellers to grow and

00:54 process their own food.

00:55 This is beautiful. This is mint. It's very good. You can even put it on tea. I'm saying

01:01 on TV. In your tea. I love tea so much.

01:05 Here, Johannesburg's self-proclaimed green lady heads the Green Business College, a place

01:11 dedicated to inspiring people to get their hands dirty in the soil and make a living

01:16 from it.

01:18 The green economy is big, so as a college, much as we cover all those sectors that I

01:23 mentioned, we start with the low-hanging fruits. The low-hanging fruits, we start at the beginning,

01:29 and the beginning is food.

01:31 For about 75 euros, the college offers a five-day workshop teaching skills to grow organic food,

01:38 cook it and preserve it. Today, Makabane is teaching her students to make pear chutney

01:45 and how to pickle vegetables for storage. It's done with household staples like vinegar,

01:51 sugar or salt.

01:52 The Green Business College also goes beyond planting, cooking and preserving.

01:57 We couple this training with business skills and exposure because we are a business college.

02:04 And we also want them to be entrepreneurs, to just go beyond doing these chutneys for

02:09 themselves.

02:10 I attended a compost class that taught me that you can also make a garden on the hard

02:17 surface. You cannot say, "I don't have space." There's also tires. Actually, that's what

02:22 I learned, that we can actually convert our waste into something productive.

02:28 South Africa can produce enough to feed its population, but in 2020, one in four households

02:35 went hungry because of the rising costs.

02:39 Making healthy food affordable was one reason Kolofelo Mpogo got into agriculture. He graduated

02:46 from the Green Business College four years ago and now runs a small urban farm in the

02:51 north of Johannesburg. The trained musician believes that people in cities need to relearn

02:58 how to grow their own food. On his plot, he regularly teaches young locals basic farming

03:05 principles.

03:06 I hope to see everyone not complaining about hunger anymore because we'll take this to

03:10 backyard gardens so that everyone has a smaller piece of what we have here. And then they

03:18 start seeing opportunities like agriculture, permaculture. There's a lot of opportunities.

03:24 There's so much money here.

03:26 Mpogo offers these courses for free. Today, another local woman has come to show how to

03:33 make self-watering planters out of old plastic bottles to grow vegetables and herbs at home,

03:41 valuable green skills in hard times.

03:43 Our economy is falling. So with this, I can plug my trash, my bitter roots, I can eat

03:50 at home. And they will all be healthy and fresh. DIY.

03:57 After training more than 2,000 students, it's success stories such as these that inspire

04:03 Matsupisu Makabane to spread her green message.

04:07 Food is everything. That's where it starts. Everybody has to eat. COVID or no COVID. Climate

04:12 change or no climate change. Poverty or no poverty. People have to eat. And everyone

04:16 eats, including the president.

04:19 Each new garden plot and every gardening lesson do much more than just help people to meet

04:25 their food needs. At the same time, the regained farming skills boost vital insect and plant

04:32 biodiversity and air quality in urban areas, while spreading the seeds of local empowerment

04:39 too.

04:39 (laughing)

04:42 No!

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