The solution lies in communal gardening.

A communal garden is a small farm that is run and managed by a community for its own consumption and the consumption of their neighbors. These can be backyard gardens, or small farms in empty lots that are managed by nearby households. They need constant supervision and require working hands, but they’re easy to set up and to manage. But what benefit can a communal garden provide?

Perhaps the most important concept behind communal gardening is the idea of democratic food production. The benefit of growing your own food is that you have the ability to decide what crops to eat, with minimized concern for prices at the market. You have control over your production. Your choice of fruits, vegetables, even chicken, fish, and other livestock, rests in your hands and not in the shelves at the local store or supermarket. You and your community can decide for themselves what to eat.

The second is a very simple idea: the closer you are to the source of your food, the more sure you are that you’ll get to eat it. A communal garden means literally having your food right next door, or in your backyard. With a well-managed garden, you can rest assured that nutritious food is a walk away, and maybe a bit of negotiation with your neighbors. This is a far cry over the hunger and uncertainty felt by many vulnerable communities.

A final, additional benefit to communal gardens is what it means for healthy community life. City life, for the most part, has separated us into individual and familial units, tearing down old community sensibilities in exchange for urban isolation. By working together towards the management of a communal garden, neighbors are made to work together to ensure food security for all. Together a community pools resources, decides what produce to invest in, works out work schedules and roles and responsibilities. Jobs and livelihoods are created while food security increases, and communities come closer together as they work toward their mutual benefit.

It’s important for us to bring farms into our cities and our communities, and doing so promises many benefits - but such a task will require much work on a local level. What can be done to ensure that every city and every barangay has its own green spaces with which the people can grow their own food upon?

Firstly, there needs to be some sort of buy-in, a proverbial foot-in-the-door, to get such green spaces up and running. In our experience, we’ve found that introducing community gardens from an enterprise perspective is particularly effective. By providing the initial seeds and capital, an institution or organization can set the groundwork for a fully-functioning communal garden. The promise of further spending power through earnings from the garden can spur townships to continue managing the space.