Kitchen gardens to alleviate hunger and malnutrition

Nutritional deficiencies in the Third World affect the daily life of almost all the poor, most of whom suffer from hunger. If we want to alleviate those deficiencies, recurrent food aid will never be a solution. That’s where kitchen or family gardens come in, not to produce more rather cheap carbohydrates, but to grow vitamin-rich, nutritious vegetables and fruits, which are generally quite expensive on the local market.

Low-tech kitchen gardens, simple and cheap like the successful, very efficient container gardens of the Urban Farmers Club in The Philippines, provide useful supplementary nutrition to poor families and their malnourished children. Moreover, container gardeners are recycling all kinds of discarded containers, composting household waste to enrich their potting soil, and reducing the volume of irrigation water by limiting evapotranspiration in containers.

Kitchen gardens play a vital role in the daily life of poor households. They are not just an expensive hobby. Considering that almost 1 billion poor people on earth suffer from continuous hunger or malnutrition, and that the trillions of dollars spent every year on food aid are not fundamentally changing global hunger problems, it is almost unacceptable to argue against kitchen gardens with “mixed feelings” about their effectiveness, citing problems like the costs of gardening “doodads”, extra workload, lack of irrigation water, lack of extra income, or wrong choice of vegetables etc.

If you ask the thousands of people in The Philippines about the effect of their container garden on their families’ nutrition, you will notice that it is never seen as an expensive hobby, but as a real need to create changes in the structural food deficit issues.