Global Garden Project

The Global Garden Project is about improving food security, nutrition and livelihoods through small-scale vegetable production in urban and peri-urban contexts around the world. It prioritises growing healthy food systems from the ground up, systems that are inclusive, resilient, safe and diverse, and which prioritise the wellbeing of people and the planet.

Urban food security and nutrition is a global concern. This project adopts a transnational, transdisciplinary, collective-learning approach to urban and peri-urban food security and nutrition. It links researchers, food producers, local government workers, and community groups across the Australia-ASEAN region and beyond.

Building on prior research projects in the Philippines, it innovatively intersects Philippine best practice of responding to crisis and disasters with Australian best practice of developing community food initiatives. The project works to support and foster vegetable production and consumption in local contexts such as Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao.

Existing small-scale vegetable production practices in local places is central to this project’s approach, which also aims to foster conditions in which new practices can emerge. The project is creating opportunities for community learning in the face of extreme weather and other challenges such as COVID-19. It creates opportunities for reconnecting people with their food and with sustainable agroecology community economy practices that improve livelihoods and health outcomes.

The Global Garden Project adopts a critical participatory action research (PAR) approach. It acknowledges that there are multiple, diverse ways in which small-scale vegetable producers engage in change, and that empowering communities to shape pathways themselves is far more likely to create wider beneficial change beyond the life of a research project. The project uses participatory community (food) economies analysis, participatory mapping, and peer-to-peer knowledge exchange to:

1. Assess the diverse economic, health and wellbeing impacts of local vegetable production initiatives
2. Identify the factors that are enabling or will enable more inclusive and effective vegetable supply chains
3. Build local capacity, knowledge and skills to ensure local ownership, partnerships and sustainable vegetable growing networks
4. Co-create new knowledge about small-scale vegetable production and community-led innovations

Improving small-scale vegetable production and marketing, and rural-urban supply chains in Northern Mindanao (completed 2020)

The first phase of the project investigated opportunities for small-scale vegetable production to feed and nourish Cagayan de Oro (CDO) City, a fast-growing urban agglomerate in Northern Mindanao, the Philippines. It examined small-scale vegetable growing practices and links with markets, supply stakeholders and institutions within the city. It highlighted the crucial role of community education and of institutions working together effectively to support small-scale agricultural development in the rural-urban interface in this increasingly vulnerable monsoon affected region.

• Making Vegetable Visible Insights from Mindanao

• Global Garden Workshop Report 2019

• Mapping and mobilising local food systems, Mindanao

• Growing together to secure our food