The community garden experience < our experience

COMMUNITY GARDENS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES - a mixed experience

Story by Russ Grayson

Family garden, Solomon Islands. The practice of community gardening is not necessarily transferrable to developing country communities.

The experience of setting up community gardens in developing countries has been mixed. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don’t.

In its early days, in 1996, the Kastom Garden Programme set up a community garden in a village on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The idea was that the garden would become a place where villagers could learn new gardening techniques so that their food supply would become more secure.

All went well

All went well at first. The villagers helped build the garden and they came to the workshops. After a while, however, project manager Tony Jansen noticed that fewer and fewer people were using the garden. He wondered why.

Soon, Tony found the answer. The villagers attended workshops in the community garden and worked to maintain it until they acquired enough knowledge to improve their own household gardens. Then their attendance fell off.

As an ongoing enterprise, the community garden was unsuccessful. But as a training facility to improve the productivity and diversity of home gardens, it had been successful. The community garden turned out to be a temporary phenomenon.

On Guadalcanal, the force of a new idea - community gardening - came up against the force of an old tradition - the family garden. While villagers made temporary use of the new idea, they transferred its lessons to their traditional form of gardening.

For the Kastom Garden Programme, the lesson was to work with what already existed - and that was family-operated food gardens.

Caritas in East Timor

The church aid agency Caritas is a development organisations using community gardens as well as home gardening in its work to improve food production in East Timor.

They report (http://www.caritas.org.au) that in the village of Oamna, a large area has been terraced as a food production garden worked by around 100 women and children.

Caritas reports that: "The garden is surrounded by an impressive stone and wood fence to keep out goats and pigs… in the centre of the garden is a large well containing an abundant water supply.

"The women of this village, from 121 families, work in the garden three times a week… the women plan to plant mustard, tomato, chilli and eggplant. When the crop is ready for harvest the women plan to eat some of the crop, keep some seeds to replant and to sell the rest of the crop… the women… say that they have developed a sense of community through working together".

Lessons

For development workers thinking of using community gardening in food security programmes, the lesson appears to be to first consider the tradition of gardening in the society and the openess of individuals and civic organisations to new ideas.

Only after carefully assessing the potential for community gardening can a considered decision be made. At stake are scarce and costly project resources and the time of trainers.

Making assumptions about community

One reason why the assumption that community gardens would work in rural communities in developing countries might be made is due to confusion of what community means.

Inexperienced development workers might see a socially intact rural community and make the assumption that, because the community is intact, the idea of community gardening would be readily accepted.

As the Kastom Garden Programme found out, communities in many developing countries base their food production on family enterprise rather than on collective community initiative.

Success in food security programmes in developing countries comes down to the quality of the agency’s information about the practices that already exist. Just because community gardening works in the individualistic West does not mean that it will work in communally-oriented developing country populations.

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PAGE UPDATED... Sunday, 30 November 2003