Reflections
Project |
Initiated By |
Serves |
Primary Goal |
Delivered Benefits |
Refugee Agency |
Elderly Refugees and Families |
Reduce Isolation |
Fresh Food |
|
College Student |
Refugees in a specific housing complex |
Food security |
Fresh Food |
|
CDC |
Immigrants, Asylees and Refugees |
Train immigrants to farm in the U.S. |
Fresh Food |
|
Tufts University and CDC |
Immigrants, Asylees and Refugees |
Train immigrants to farm in the U.S. |
Fresh Food |
On Refugee Gardens
In the last chapter of City Bountiful, Laura Lawson warns that
“A potentially more serious by-product of an unarticulated faith in gardening as a cure for crisis is the tendency to propose urban gardens as treatments for largely unsolvable issues. The credibility of urban gardening as a change agent is compromised when the gardens serve as opportunistic stopgap measures that in fact mask the real issue at stake. In times of crisis, the neighborhood garden becomes a place to go, to get active, to meet neighbors, and to make daily life more palatable. The tangible nature of the results satisfies political leaders and donors looking for a “photo op,” while the larger issues that prompted the gardens in the first place, such as environmental injustice, educational disparity, or lack of economic opportunity, are more or less ignored.”<1>
When the Assistant Secretary with the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration delivered a speech at one of the refugee community gardens in Boise, the garden acted as a testimony to the greater community’s tolerance for newcomers. I cannot help but wonder if this tolerance is perhaps overstated.
Is this city, with its mostly-white, faith-based community, going to openly embrace the Iraqis who are scheduled for arrival in 2008?
Do the gardens smooth over a commonly-held belief that refugees are drains on America’s welfare state? If so, how many gardens will it take to change people’s perceptions?
However, there are undeniable benefits for the gardeners. The mental and physical health benefits alone more than justify the program’s existence. We should just be mindful that gardens alone can not alleviate the pressures felt by a community in transition.
On Refugee Farm Training Projects
In thinking about these nationally and internationally funded initiatives to promote immigrant farm ownership, I can’t help but ask:
If small-scale farming is no longer a viable vocation for Americans, why are we encouraging new immigrants to enter this enterprise? Should we not be educating and training them for emerging industries instead of dying ones?
Given that 85% of the graduates of Tuft’s NESFP have not achieved independence, it is clear that these programs are not economically sustainable, despite their contributing to the local foods movement. In her reflection on eighteen years of studying this movement, Joan Gussow arrived at this conclusion:
“Truly sustainable food systems will be those that provide good jobs for all of those working with food and good food for everyone who eats.”<2>
Environmental, therapeutic, and social benefits of urban gardens can’t come at the expense of economic development.
I think that Amy Carrington, of the Lewiston NASAP, has a realistic outlook. She sees the farm training program as a way to help refugees work towards self-defined goals. Rather than assume that refugee farmers will become economically independent, she accepts that the program might best act as a stepping stone toward new life choices.
If this is really the strength of such projects, then I think we must admit that these training farms function a lot like oversized gardens.
Limits of my research
Given the time constraints on this study, I did not do any first person interviews with the refugees that participate in any of the garden/farm projects, nor did I visit any of the sites. The conclusions I've drawn were based on a literature review, interviews with project directors, and classroom discussion.
=====
<1> Laura J. Lawson, City Bountiful: A Century of Gardening in America (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 290.
<2> Joan Dye Gussow, "Dietary guidelines for sustainability: Twelve years later," Journal of Nutrition Education (Hamilton: Jul/Aug 1999) 194-201.
Website created by Amy Stitely - December 2007
MIT Course 11.308 - Urban Nature and City Design - Professor Anne Spirn