On December 13th, people were welcomed to the HILLSIDE ALLOTMENT GARDEN (Utanon alang sa Masanag nga Kaugmaon). This new garden was established through the joint efforts of the Community in Sitio Hillside, Barangay Lapasan, the City of Cagayan de Oro and Xavier University’s Periurban Vegetable Project (PUVeP). Financial support was offered by the Allotment Garden Association of Sint-Amandsberg (“Volkstuinen Slotenkouter”) and the Provincial Government of East-Flanders (Ghent, Belgium). Technical assistance was provided by the German Development Cooperation (CIM).
Who could ever deny that allotment gardens merit to be promoted as one of the best practices to combat desertification, hunger and poverty ? Any time wars on this planet have disturbed the global life (see World War I and II), allotment gardens have been created everywhere on pieces of barren land. They have saved thousands of lives of poor people by offering them a chance to produce their own bit of food and the necessary vitamins and mineral elements for their children. As a young boy, I have seen myself the success stories of a number of allotment gardens in Flanders during and after World War II, and I can assure you that, even nowadays, numerous people in my country Belgium are still enthusiastic about these splendid opportunities offered by our cities and villages.
Imagine what such allotment gardens could signify for people in the drylands or for the most unfortunate ones in the refugee camps all over this world. This is one of the reasons why I still don’t understand why international aid organizations, donors and NGOs do not concentrate their efforts on the creation of gardens, be it allotment gardens, family gardens or school gardens, to provide food security for millions of people.
Could someone tell me why such gardens can be created thanks to individual efforts of some small associations or organizations, like the Allotment Gardens Slotenkouter and the Provincial Government of East-Flanders in Belgium, and why such a “best practice” is not yet applied at the global scale, thanks to the financial support of important international donors ? Could this be discussed within the UNCCD ? Could this be studied as a possible theme for some famous Foundations ?
Or, shall we continue for ages to send masses of food to hungry people at regular intervals, or shouldn’t we change our strategy and start creating gardens everywhere ? With my Chinese friends I say : “Don’t give them food, teach them how to grow it !“, even in the desert.
For many years already I have been building an e-mail network for people interested in desertification, poverty and dryland gardening. Recently, I opened a part of this blog to “container gardening“. The main reason for the establishment of such a network is that I noticed, when speaking with my colleagues of the Committee for Science and Technology (CST) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), that we all spend a lot of time searching the internet for interesting publications concerning our fields of interest. Everyone is looking for the same information, spending considerable time to find mostly the same articles, all of us reading these texts to see if their content is important enough, and if it is, to use that info for our own purposes.
There is no general communication whatever between the members of the CST and between many more people interested in desertification, poverty, agriculture, horticulture and sustainable development. It does not suffice to send them the addresses of interesting websites, because not all the articles on that sites deal with dryland gardening, desertification, poverty, sustainable development or container gardening, so that we all have to start again searching and reading the content of the different sites. In other words: we all waste the same amount of time !
Therefore, I started selecting messages on these topics and all related subjects that can be important for people interested in the issues mentioned above and republishing the texts (some entirely, some partly) on my blog, so that my visitors do not have to switch again to all those websites to look for the entire texts they possibly want to read. My main aim is to reflect the diversity of publications on these topics. Thereby, I try to ease up the access to a panoply of articles and stories and to a panoply of sites and blogs. From time to time, I am also publishing my own contributions, mostly about my own experience with ways and means to improve plant growth in the drylands with a minimum of water and fertilizer.
Some people seem to be not so happy with this system, claiming their property rights. If so, I respect their views. I do not wish to harm their proper interests, whatever their objectives to create a public site or blog may be. I only tried to bring the attention of thousands of people worldwide to their messages.
Again, for me all this is a question of offering time-saving to my readers. This is not MY BLOG, it is OURS for I am only the administrator to easy up the work of many colleagues and friends. My blog visitors seem to be very happy with this system, as I offer them a chance to save plenty of time by aggregating valuable information on all aspects of the topics in a sort of newsletter, in which I (re)publish that what seems to be of some interest to most of us. This way, we all save time for more practical things to do and meanwhile we bring interesting websites and blogs to the attention of many more people worldwide than one single site or blog could do for itself.
Personally, I spend this time for collecting and aggregating the info because I am a retired professor of the Ghent University (Belgium) and I want to serve my colleagues and friends in an efficient way, without any other personal advantage than having the pleasure to serve and to do it the best way I can.
Of course, I mention always the source of the info I collect from the internet, so that the visitors of my blog can be immediately linked to my sources and go to these websites for additional interesting messages. Moreover, I am listing the links with important sites and blogs under my “Blogroll”, so that visitors of my blog can click directly the website’s address.
Observations, remarks, critics or additional ideas are always welcome. I also hope to find ways and means to improve cooperation and networking between people working for closely related websites. There is still a lot of improvement and collaboration to realize. Let’s do it together, in full respect for the work achieved by all of us, instead of “combating” each other in the battle of worldwide information!
Who could ever deny that allotment gardens merit to be promoted as one of the best practices to combat desertification, hunger and poverty ? Any time wars on this planet have disturbed the global life (see World War I and II), allotment gardens have been created everywhere on pieces of barren land. They have saved thousands of lives of poor people by offering them a chance to produce their own bit of food and the necessary vitamins and mineral elements for their children. As a young boy, I have seen myself the success stories of a number of allotment gardens in Flanders during and after World War II, and I can assure you that, even nowadays, numerous people in my country Belgium are still enthusiastic about these splendid opportunities offered by our cities and villages.
Imagine what such allotment gardens could signify for people in the drylands or for the most unfortunate ones in the refugee camps all over this world. This is one of the reasons why I still don’t understand why international aid organizations, donors and NGOs do not concentrate their efforts on the creation of gardens, be it allotment gardens, family gardens or school gardens, to provide food security for millions of people.
Could someone tell me why such gardens can be created thanks to individual efforts of some small associations or organizations, like the Allotment Gardens Slotenkouter and the Provincial Government of East-Flanders in Belgium, and why such a “best practice” is not yet applied at the global scale, thanks to the financial support of important international donors ? Could this be discussed within the UNCCD ? Could this be studied as a possible theme for some famous Foundations ?
Or, shall we continue for ages to send masses of food to hungry people at regular intervals, or shouldn’t we change our strategy and start creating gardens everywhere ? With my Chinese friends I say : “Don’t give them food, teach them how to grow it !“, even in the desert.
For many years already I have been building an e-mail network for people interested in desertification, poverty and dryland gardening. Recently, I opened a part of this blog to “container gardening“. The main reason for the establishment of such a network is that I noticed, when speaking with my colleagues of the Committee for Science and Technology (CST) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), that we all spend a lot of time searching the internet for interesting publications concerning our fields of interest. Everyone is looking for the same information, spending considerable time to find mostly the same articles, all of us reading these texts to see if their content is important enough, and if it is, to use that info for our own purposes.
There is no general communication whatever between the members of the CST and between many more people interested in desertification, poverty, agriculture, horticulture and sustainable development. It does not suffice to send them the addresses of interesting websites, because not all the articles on that sites deal with dryland gardening, desertification, poverty, sustainable development or container gardening, so that we all have to start again searching and reading the content of the different sites. In other words: we all waste the same amount of time !
Therefore, I started selecting messages on these topics and all related subjects that can be important for people interested in the issues mentioned above and republishing the texts (some entirely, some partly) on my blog, so that my visitors do not have to switch again to all those websites to look for the entire texts they possibly want to read. My main aim is to reflect the diversity of publications on these topics. Thereby, I try to ease up the access to a panoply of articles and stories and to a panoply of sites and blogs. From time to time, I am also publishing my own contributions, mostly about my own experience with ways and means to improve plant growth in the drylands with a minimum of water and fertilizer.
Some people seem to be not so happy with this system, claiming their property rights. If so, I respect their views. I do not wish to harm their proper interests, whatever their objectives to create a public site or blog may be. I only tried to bring the attention of thousands of people worldwide to their messages.
Again, for me all this is a question of offering time-saving to my readers. This is not MY BLOG, it is OURS for I am only the administrator to easy up the work of many colleagues and friends. My blog visitors seem to be very happy with this system, as I offer them a chance to save plenty of time by aggregating valuable information on all aspects of the topics in a sort of newsletter, in which I (re)publish that what seems to be of some interest to most of us. This way, we all save time for more practical things to do and meanwhile we bring interesting websites and blogs to the attention of many more people worldwide than one single site or blog could do for itself.
Personally, I spend this time for collecting and aggregating the info because I am a retired professor of the Ghent University (Belgium) and I want to serve my colleagues and friends in an efficient way, without any other personal advantage than having the pleasure to serve and to do it the best way I can.
Of course, I mention always the source of the info I collect from the internet, so that the visitors of my blog can be immediately linked to my sources and go to these websites for additional interesting messages. Moreover, I am listing the links with important sites and blogs under my “Blogroll”, so that visitors of my blog can click directly the website’s address.
Observations, remarks, critics or additional ideas are always welcome. I also hope to find ways and means to improve cooperation and networking between people working for closely related websites. There is still a lot of improvement and collaboration to realize. Let’s do it together, in full respect for the work achieved by all of us, instead of “combating” each other in the battle of worldwide information!
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