Papers > By author > Camargo Clara

The economic, social, politic and environmental crises that take place all around the world have an enormous strength in Brazil. Although Brazil has developed a great part of its population during the last decades, including leaving the hunger map driven by Food and Agriculture Organization, in the last years, a big part of population is unemployed and many people are living in situations of vulnerability.

In the global context, FAO data shows that there is a trend towards an increase in the number of the hungry. If in the world in 2016 this number was 815 million individuals, in 2017, it reached the mark of the 821 million people (FAO et al., 2018).

Considering this context, a curious phenomenon has come to the scene of some industrial cities: the urban farming. Some scientists have shown that Detroit is promoting agriculture as an alternative way of land use after many families have left the city due to the economic crises (MOGK et al, 2010).

In a smaller scale São Paulo, the most urbanized city in Latin America shows that it´s also possible there. Many gardens are being grown by people living in the same neighborhood. The motivations vary from different people: improve the yields in the periphery, improve food security and the access to local and healthy food and also the “green guerrilla” – a movement of fighting for a greener and more sustainable city.

Urban farming has an objectivity side – to avoid hunger and to warranty basic needs to the society, but it also deals with subjectivity once it encourages people to work together and to create cooperation, knowledge and solidarity.

HARDT & NEGRI (2016) affirm that we cannot accept the old ideas for new questions of development nowadays. They mean liberalism and social democracy defined by the power of private property or by the power of the State respectively do not consider the biopolitcs and then can not be sufficient to create a fair and sustainable multitude.

For these authors, biopolitics can be described with the following characteristics: resistance, counterpower, alternative production of subjectivity, autonomy, innovation, queer event, network, political strategy, bodies in struggle, and shattering ruling identities and norms. Hardt and Negri summarize: “To mark this difference between the two ‘powers of life', we adopt a terminological distinction, suggested by Foucault's writings but not used consistently by him, between biopower and biopolitics, whereby the former could be defined (rather crudely) as the power over life and the latter as the power of life to resist and determine an alternative production of subjectivity.”

In this sense my research aims to analyze whether urban farming in São Paulo can be seen as a commonwealth experience and if it can create an alternative economy to its users (farmers, consumers, social fighters). To achieve this aim I´ll do an empirical study considering the urban farmers who are embedded in fair trade systems to evaluate their origins, the way they work (associations, participation of women and young, ecological systems) and the species of vegetal biodiversity they produce.

This research is interdisciplinary considering the social and economic context as well as the environmental conditions for food production, distribution and consumption in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo, Brazil.