São Paulo is the biggest city in the Southern Hemisphere, with nearly 20 million people living in the metropolitan area. It is a booming, energetic, crowded, polluted, congested, industrial, and sprawling city with very few green areas, surrounded by highly productive agricultural lands and what’s left of the Atlantic rainforest.
The question of how to develop more sustainable relationships between agriculture and the city is a question that speaks to many stakeholders in São Paulo. Living in a city originally made rich by coffee and sugar plantations, a city that has experienced rapid in-migration from rural areas, and a city that lies right in the bread-basket of Brazil, the “Paulistanos” historically have a significant cultural connection to the countryside. Meanwhile the day-to-day life in the mega-city is generally profoundly disconnected from nature and ecological processes.
How do we create a more intimate relationship between producers and consumers, between people and nature, between the city and the ecosystem within which it exists? How do we promote more sustainable metabolic processes for São Paulo, considering how and where our food is produced, how it is distributed, and how it is or isn’t wasted? Can we contribute to localizing supply chains? How do we value, recognise, strengthen, and capacitate local producers? Can we contribute to building closed-loop systems, where waste of one process is the food for another? What are the possibilities of building multi-functional farms and gardens, that besides meeting material demands for food and energy, also meet immaterial demands for health, education, eco-tourism, conservation, and connection with nature and with other people?How can we think more systemically, innovatively, and intelligently about the relationship between São Paulo and the agriculture on which it depends and with which it is in so many ways intimately connected?
These are some of the core questions being addressed by the Metropolitan Agriculture team in São Paulo. The project in São Paulo was launched in an inaugural workshop in November 2009. Over the course of September-December, 20 stakeholders participated in extensive dialogue interviews, the results of which were summarised in a synthesis report. In 2010, the local online platform (http://metroagsp.ning.com) was built, and a series of 5 local workshops have been held including a 3-day “innovation lab” for approximately 20 participants from different sectors, focused on the question of connecting producers and consumers.
Following the innovation lab, the participants started working on 3 projects in particular:
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A project that allows local producers to supply organic produce directly to schools, as part of the recently adopted law that requires 30% of purchases for schools’ feeding schemes to be from small-scale family farmers. The project looks at how to optimize this relationship in a win-win way for schools and producers.
A project that allows local producers to supply organic produce directly to schools, as part of the recently adopted law that requires 30% of purchases for schools’ feeding schemes to be from small-scale family farmers. The project looks at how to optimize this relationship in a win-win way for schools and producers.– A project on new models/social technologies for commercialization of organic and agro-ecological products at larger scale, connected with a process of consumer education. This project builds on 11 years of experience of a company called “Sabor Natural” (natural flavors/taste).
– A project to promote “reference centers” for food security, urban and peri-urban agriculture.
Other ideas emerging from the Innovation Lab include: consumer cooperatives, participatory certification, awareness-raising around seasonality and incorporating this in business opportunities, systems for composting organic waste from the city, inclusion of agriculture-related themes in public schools, improving technical assistance and capacity-building for producers, development of a certification for “sustainability”, partnerships with restaurants to create healthy haute-cuisine dishes with local products, and more.
Conversations are also underway around how to better institutionalise Metropolitan Agriculture principles at a state government level.
The participants look forward to participating in the international conference in end of September and to continuing the work locally to make a visible mark on the metropole of São Paulo and the areas that surround it.