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The vegetable garden in the Manguinhos favela is the size of three football fields and is located under a power line
Photo: Ian Cheibub / DER SPIEGEL
If he didn't work here, he would be dead long ago. Leonardo Ferreira is convinced of that.
He is leaning on a rake, a young man with bushy brows in a hoodie, green T-shirt and flip-flops.
Then he sweeps up a few sheets of paper.
Birds are chirping, it smells like lemon balm.
A cat sneaks through the vegetable patch.
Ferreira, 24, has been a gardener for around seven years.
Before that, he had worked for a drug gang since he was twelve.
"It was my job to shoot policemen," he says with a bashful grin.
"I thank God I got out of there before it was too late."
The farm where Ferreira turns up every morning at eight o'clock is in the middle of the Manguinhos favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, surrounded by unplastered, chaotically jumbled houses with corrugated iron roofs, by narrow streets at the ends of which young men sell cocaine, next to a river, which is used as a sewerage system and a railway line.
Manguinhos has around 50,000 inhabitants.
The police appear here regularly and shoot from armored cars or helicopters.
And yet this farm is a peaceful place, a green resting place, the size of three football fields.
It is the largest of 49 so-called Hortas Cariocas and part of a project by the city administration of Rio de Janeiro.
The farms not only create jobs for dropouts from the drug milieu, for the unemployed, single parents and retirees, they also provide the people in the slums with food.
When many residents of the favelas lost their jobs during the pandemic, the government stopped the emergency aid payments after a few months and food prices rose sharply, they started producing
Farms organically grown fruit and vegetables and gave them to the poorest - more than 80 tons last year without asking for money.
More than 20,000 families benefited from it.
The award-winning Hortas Cariocas concept was developed around 15 years ago by a man named Julio Cesar Barros, who works in the city administration's environmental department.
As a child he worked in the fields on his grandfather's farm, he says he learned more there than he did during his studies.
Many urban vegetable gardens were destroyed when the city was expanded in the 1950s.
He is also interested in preserving the farming knowledge and the tradition of growing vegetables in Rio de Janeiro.
Above all, however, Barros believes in a "human right to healthy nutrition."
At around one million reals (around 160,000 euros) annually, the program is comparatively inexpensive; the money is used to pay the monthly payments for the gardeners, their training, equipment and materials such as gasoline.
A total of 216 gardeners are employed as volunteers at the Hortas Cariocas.
You receive 500 real a month;
that is less than 100 euros and corresponds to almost half of the minimum wage in Brazil.
In normal times, they make additional income by selling fruits and vegetables in the markets.
“It's unusual for projects in slums to be so successful,” says Barros. “The trick is: You have to keep things simple.” Like gardening.
And people have to want it themselves too.
Ultimately, it is easy to work in the favela;
people may be a little suspicious at first, but basically very approachable.
"They are incredibly grateful, you just have to deal with them correctly."
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