Climate change, the war in Ukraine and the effects of COVID-19 are contributing to rising food prices. Growing fruit and vegetables instead of buying them could be the answer. In Johannesburg, urban agriculture projects are teaching locals how to garden.
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00:00 Nestled up to the high-rise offices of downtown Johannesburg lies Lawrenceville, but it's
00:07 no high-income neighborhood. In South Africa, food prices rose by 14 percent this year,
00:13 and residents here are barely screeping by.
00:17 Every day is hard. Sometimes they rot, and as you can see, the green peppers. I see last
00:21 time, I usually buy the box 35 rand. Last week I go there, I see the box, it was 75
00:27 rand.
00:27 As long as the petrol is going up, the food will surely go up. The food will surely go
00:32 up. So hey, managing nowadays, we have to cut.
00:36 One way out of the predicament could be urban agriculture. The Victoria Yards precinct in
00:42 Lawrenceville is just one example of what could be possible in Johannesburg. At this
00:47 revamped industrial site, Matsupiso Makabane wants to motivate urban dwellers to grow and
00:54 process their own food.
00:55 This is beautiful. This is mint. It's very good. You can even put it on tea. I'm saying
01:01 on TV. In your tea. I love tea so much.
01:05 Here, Johannesburg's self-proclaimed green lady heads the Green Business College, a place
01:11 dedicated to inspiring people to get their hands dirty in the soil and make a living
01:16 from it.
01:18 The green economy is big, so as a college, much as we cover all those sectors that I
01:23 mentioned, we start with the low-hanging fruits. The low-hanging fruits, we start at the beginning,
01:29 and the beginning is food.
01:31 For about 75 euros, the college offers a five-day workshop teaching skills to grow organic food,
01:38 cook it and preserve it. Today, Makabane is teaching her students to make pear chutney
01:45 and how to pickle vegetables for storage. It's done with household staples like vinegar,
01:51 sugar or salt.
01:52 The Green Business College also goes beyond planting, cooking and preserving.
01:57 We couple this training with business skills and exposure because we are a business college.
02:04 And we also want them to be entrepreneurs, to just go beyond doing these chutneys for
02:09 themselves.
02:10 I attended a compost class that taught me that you can also make a garden on the hard
02:17 surface. You cannot say, "I don't have space." There's also tires. Actually, that's what
02:22 I learned, that we can actually convert our waste into something productive.
02:28 South Africa can produce enough to feed its population, but in 2020, one in four households
02:35 went hungry because of the rising costs.
02:39 Making healthy food affordable was one reason Kolofelo Mpogo got into agriculture. He graduated
02:46 from the Green Business College four years ago and now runs a small urban farm in the
02:51 north of Johannesburg. The trained musician believes that people in cities need to relearn
02:58 how to grow their own food. On his plot, he regularly teaches young locals basic farming
03:05 principles.
03:06 I hope to see everyone not complaining about hunger anymore because we'll take this to
03:10 backyard gardens so that everyone has a smaller piece of what we have here. And then they
03:18 start seeing opportunities like agriculture, permaculture. There's a lot of opportunities.
03:24 There's so much money here.
03:26 Mpogo offers these courses for free. Today, another local woman has come to show how to
03:33 make self-watering planters out of old plastic bottles to grow vegetables and herbs at home,
03:41 valuable green skills in hard times.
03:43 Our economy is falling. So with this, I can plug my trash, my bitter roots, I can eat
03:50 at home. And they will all be healthy and fresh. DIY.
03:57 After training more than 2,000 students, it's success stories such as these that inspire
04:03 Matsupisu Makabane to spread her green message.
04:07 Food is everything. That's where it starts. Everybody has to eat. COVID or no COVID. Climate
04:12 change or no climate change. Poverty or no poverty. People have to eat. And everyone
04:16 eats, including the president.
04:19 Each new garden plot and every gardening lesson do much more than just help people to meet
04:25 their food needs. At the same time, the regained farming skills boost vital insect and plant
04:32 biodiversity and air quality in urban areas, while spreading the seeds of local empowerment
04:39 too.
04:39 (laughing)
04:42 No!