Tag Archives: food resilience

Insight

City Farms Growing Resilience

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Leadership, training and support help overcome challenges in community farming in Kuala Lumpur’s public housing, sowing success.

WITH FOOD prices ever increasing, community farming for food security among lower income city-dwellers is ever more critical. The pandemic saw the media trumpeting the importance of such programmes.

However, as long as 5 years ago in 2017, the local government in Kuala Lumpur started encouraging the residents of both the Public Housing (PA) and the People’s Housing Programme (PPR) to be involved in community farming. And the programme has sowed some success.

(Photo: Successful community farming projects yield healthy home-grown vegetables that feed all the farmers and their families  | Image by Tan Kai Ren)

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Insight

Back to the jungle? The myth of indigenous community resilience

Indigenous people in Malaysia and the world over isolated themselves from society to avoid Covid-19. But do they have enough food resilience to do so? Macaranga looks at the issue as part of its Taking Stock series.

WHEN MEDIA reported Orang Asli moving “back to the jungle” during the Covid-19 lockdown and blockading their villages against outsiders, the stories fed a prevailing romanticised myth that indigenous communities are self-sufficient.

But in reality, most Orang Asli cannot harvest all they need from the forest and have in addition, stopped subsistence farming. Instead, they are plugged into and rely on the modern economy for their livelihoods.

(Photo: In Pahang’s highlands, Muri a/p Jerhuk tends to her hill paddy plot. Pic by Jeffry Hassan)

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