THE WITS FOOD GARDEN: A FOOD SOVEREIGNTY APPROACH?

The wits food garden was established by the the wits citizenship and community outreach(WCCO) together with Co-operative and Policy Alternative  Center(COPAC), and Wits Inala Forum which the student forum with the intention of helping to sustain student life and alleviating hunger within the wits community space.This garden is planted and maintained by the students for the benefit of the students, and they plant vegetables ranging from spinach, onions, cabbages and many others that go towards providing a nutritional diet.

When the concept of creating gardens in the urban space in order to address the food crisis is discussed in its wider context, it is found that there is little evidence that link urban agriculture directly to food security due to space , time and socioeconomic issues as discussed in the “Why urban agriculture isn’t a panacea for food crisis” Conversation piece . Though the argument that there is no linear relationship between urban agriculture and food security has its own merits, it becomes crucial to understand why the gardens are formed in the first place, not all is food security or nothing.

Just like the case in Khayelitsha, where the community took it upon themselves to utilize an illegal dumping space and created a vegetable patch to promote community’s self reliance while reducing their dependence on supermarkets (Case Study). The Wits food  garden also seeks to decomodify food and make the space conducive to building social ties and the cultural interactions through food. It does this as to take control of the food system back through the support of local and small scale farmers, bottom up approach and the production of their own food.

There is a worrying concern that the sovereignty from the state help or even intervention can be viewed as giving the state a ”get out of jail free card”. this gives the government the impression that the issue is being dealt with and therefore does not require its intervention.The programme also does not fully take in cognisense the stigmatization and humiliation that is associated with charity (this is how it is viewed by people who benefit from this).

The existing food system that we have presently at Wits is a way of redefining our ideological thinking of food as it draws charity as an alternative to addressing issues of food security. Though it is currently done in a smaller scale, it still remain a powerful tool which can be reproduced to other elsewheres and us as the Wits community will act as agents for creating just transition in our food regime.