The City that Ended Hunger

A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger. posted Feb 13, 2009 “To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. “I knew we had so much hunger in the world.

The Permablitz: Transforming Urban Homesteads in a Single Day Do you remember that 'night before Christmas' feeling... the one you used to get as a kid? The night before my Permablitz, an 'I don't know if I can wait until morning' impatience had me pacing, while a slightly buzzy feeling took hold. Yep, it was 'the night before Christmas' all over again -- even though it was mid-August, and I was 32 years old. Why was I so excited? The plan was: my entire front yard lawn would be ripped out and a pretty but water-hungry gardenia bed would be demolished, along with quite a lot of decorative landscaping. The plans for the backyard were even more ambitious. What made everything so exciting was the fact that everything was going to happen in 24 hours. If I were to actually pay a tradesman or two to do all this work, the project would take months, and the cost of labour would run to many thousands of dollars. What is a Permablitz? As a concept, a Permablitz is very similar to the barn raisings of 18th and 19th century rural America.