Micro-farming among the poor Cape Town

Greetings from blustery Autumn Cape Town, Dear Global Giving Friends

As you all must know, besides water and soil conservation, and of course plentiful compost, seed saving is the foundation of sustainability in any farming and gardeneing system.

These days not many farmers or gardeners (compared to the past) save their seeds, but have become increasingly reliant on big seed corporations, who are doing their best to buy out or own all smaller seed companies. They try to become owners of all varieties and adaptions and thus the farmers/gardeners become more and more at the mercy of the corporations, who do all sorts of funny things which are not always good for nature or for health.

So we in ABALIMI have for many years been encouraging informal seed saving among our micro-farmers. 

The little report, in the link below, shows how we are also helped by other organisations and networks to further this aim. You will see some young faces, which is increasingly the case now that we have managed to provide a market for the surplus produced by our micro-farmers through Harvest of Hope - www.harvestofhope.co.za.   This means that livelihoods can be made and even careers in micro-farming can be envisioned. And this attracts the unemployed youth as well !

Very much more has to be done to revive seed saving as a new cultural practice in our modern times and especially among the micro-farmers who we work with.

We have also launched the introduction of Bio-Dynamic agriculture preparations into the movement (see attached report) through a first intervention. This has had to wait 33 years until we had first created a movement among black farmers who understood the difference between Chemical and Organic and that Organic is better by far.  Now Bio Dynamics, the most advanced agricultural technology on the planet, can be introduced, and can be accepted as a next step and not some sort of juju.

Thank you for continuing to support our movement.

Remember, we are not a begin-end project.  We are a movement for organic micro-farming among the poor and un-employed who comprise nearly 50% of our population in SA and indeed worldwide.

Despite all that lovely reported GDP growth, it really only (largely) benefits the already priveleged, while the gap between the "poor" and the "rich" just grows and grows.

So it's wonderful when you reach out, like you continue to do, to support our work here in SA, to continue to build the bridge "between the worlds" .

All the very best,

Rob Small

Links:

• Seed Saving Workshop with young farmers

• BD Process in ABALIMI (PDF)