Feeding India: Community Gardens and their Food Security Potential

This thesis explores the historical reasons behind food insecurity in India, especially the changes in common property resource management and land ownership rights. Because common property resources are supplementary and require less expensive inputs, they are cheap, easy to grow, and available during difficult times. Community gardening, as a form of common property, ensures local food security and has the potential to restore lost common resources and land practices to at-risk communities. The privatization of land and commodification of common property resources at the time of colonization is the primary cause of the current problem of local food insecurity in India. While rural and tribal people can no longer legally gather common property resources in protected areas, the poor still rely on common property to supplement their lifestyles today. As a result of their illegal use, resource management is a point of contention between these communities and the Indian government as both parties claim some rights to the land and forests. Through field research conducted in conjunction with Vanastree, a biodiversity and conservation non-profit in Southern India, I created the Aldona Home Garden and Learning Center community garden blueprint to show an example of a common property garden that promotes food security and social capital. While community gardens are not the sole answer to food security in India, they could be used by a variety of development entities to ensure immediate local food security and restore communal land rights.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Oregon

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Cromwell, Jaye

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Weiss, Anita

• Food insecurity
• Community gardening
• India
• Agricultural issues
• Land privatization

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US
• UO theses and dissertations are provided for research and educational purposes and may be under copyright by the author or the author’s heirs. Please contact scholars@uoregon.edu with any questions or comments. In your email, be sure to include the URL and title of the specific items that you are inquiring about.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/33158

OAI record oai:identifier

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Ascholarsbank.uoregon.edu%3A1794%2F33158