Above photo: Agostina Beatriz Chicaiza, 69, runs a farm in the suburbs of Quito, Ecuador.
In Ecuador, urban farms have long been a way to create sustainable access to food.
But they’re also helping women flourish as gardeners and entrepreneurs.
Up in the lung-busting altitudes of Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, 71-year-old Maria Achiña and 70-year-old Alegria Irua are busy digging up soil and plucking weeds from their modest allotment of kale, onions, broccoli and cilantro.
The green-fingered pair are part of a group of local women who till the land beside the neighborhood’s health clinic, which is free to them under the city’s celebrated participatory urban agriculture project focused on gender, climate and food justice.
“It gives us good food to eat and a bit of income to help pay the bills,” says Achiña, who lost both her husband and daughter in recent years. “And besides, us old ladies, we need to fill our time with something.”
The plot is one of thousands across Quito that have been created since 2002 under the Participatory Urban Agriculture Program (AGRUPAR), a municipal scheme that supports the growing of organic food for household sales and self-consumption.
To date, some 21,000 urban farmers have been trained and provided with technical assistance in Quito. But gender justice and women’s empowerment are central to the program.
While anyone can participate, AGRUPAR prioritizes vulnerable populations, such as victims of domestic violence, female heads of household who are unemployed, elderly women, people who are disabled, and refugees. As a result, women in vulnerable situations represent 84% of participants, who are trained in agroecology, farm animal husbandry, food processing, and entrepreneurship to improve livelihoods and increase food security.
“This is about the right to food,” says Alexandra Rodríguez Dueñas, the coordinator of AGRUPAR. “In Quito, food is often seen as the responsibility of women within households. By supporting urban farming, we are supporting women.”
Sitting high in the foothills of the Andes at around 9,000 feet altitude, Quito is surrounded by mountains with only two access roads. Its geographic position means it is vulnerable to external food supply disruption, making urban agriculture programs crucial.
Proponents say locally-resilient urban food systems like Quito’s, which promote agriculture based in and around cities, not only aid vulnerable groups and battle food poverty, but also cut the climate toll of food production, maintain cultural traditions of farming, boost the consumption of healthy foods and even encourage socializing.
While the green trend for city-grown food is more recent, Quito’s urban agriculture project dates back decades to Ecuador’s economic crisis in the 1990s, which saw a switch of currency from the sucre to the dollar, instantly devaluing local salaries and forcing many into food insecurity. Some 48% of the population were then living below the poverty line.
“Urban agriculture was our strategy to create access to food,” says Dueñas.
Over the years, more than 4,000 allotments have been created: urban farming on roof terraces, greenhouses within the city center, larger farms on the outskirts of Quito, peri-urban and rural farms that supply inner-city residents.
The urban gardens produce more than 1.95 million kilograms of organic food per year – about 4.3 million pounds. Many of the gardeners sell their organically-grown food in over a dozen weekly city markets known as “bioferias” that provide a sales point for producers.
Agostina Beatriz Chicaiza, 69, and Maria Gladys Chicaiza, 52, run a farm together in the suburbs of Quito. The pair earns up to $200 per week by cultivating organic crops like broccoli, cauliflower, corn and potatoes, which are sold at a bioferia in the city.
“It provides us with a better income than many other people receive,” says Agostina.
Each participant gains an average of $175 of extra income per month through the project, roughly 3.5 times the amount of human development funding invested by City Hall, according to Laine Young, a researcher at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems, who studied the Quito scheme.
“AGRUPAR is an incredibly empowering project for women across the city, but it is also impactful for people experiencing classism, racism and ableism,” says Young. “It has also been extremely effective in helping low-income people from Quito have food security and maintain an income.”
In an attempt to balance the books, the project is also run by CONQUITO, a private agency set up by the municipality in 2005. Under it, there is an aspect of cost-sharing where participants pay for training and technical assistance at an affordable rate ($1 to attend general training and $2 for bespoke support, including site visits).
“This helps participants to work towards economic independence,” adds Young.
Pierre Paul Audate of the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec, who carried out a study in 2019 comparing urban agriculture in Montreal and Quito, argues the major achievement is how Quito made the initiative part of its city planning. The rules regarding urban agriculture are often not clear in many cities across the world, explains Audate, hampering the rollout and scale-up of farms.
“Quito’s project has been a huge success,” he says. “When you look at Montreal, these are mostly small-scale initiatives doing it by themselves. But in Quito, urban agriculture has been made part of the public policy of the city.”
Yet securing the overall economic sustainability of the project is still a challenge that lies ahead.
“While it has good practices regarding payment for training and technical assistance to keep the support going, AGRUPAR is still very dependent on governmental funding,” Young explains.
There is also a “significantly larger population that needs support than AGRUPAR has the capacity for,” considering the large population of Quito and the high poverty and malnutrition rates in the city, according to Young. She believes that the project capacity could be increased by forging partnerships with other city departments.
And even advocates like Dueñas admit that, due to land availability and the climate, Quito can only produce a fraction of the food it requires. But ongoing developments have seen the importance of urban agriculture for the city underlined further, with food recently integrated into the Quito Climate Action Plan for 2050.
In the meantime, Quito’s efforts to cultivate a sustainable and just urban food system are bearing fruit.
“Before I didn’t know how to cultivate a thing, not even cilantro,” says Susana Sacancela, 44, who owns a one-hectare farm where they grow lettuce, cherries and herbs to be sold to neighbors and at city markets.
“Now the power is in my hands.”