The City of Johannesburg’s Member of Mayoral Committee for Health and Social Development, Councillor Mpho Phalatse, urged residents of Pennyville in Soweto to turn illegal dumping sites into vegetable gardens to fight against hunger, malnutrition and poverty.
MMC Phalatse was speaking at the World Food Day event organised by the City’s Food Resilience Unit.
The unit was established to contribute towards breaking the cycle of poverty, hunger and undernourishment and create conditions that are suitable for agricultural development, sustainable livelihoods and alleviate food insecurity.
Pennyville residents who qualified after indigent assessment by a team of social workers received food parcels.
“Vegetables are expensive and as the City we are working on helping elevate that burden from our residents. We provide vegetable seeds for free to all City’s of Joburg residents. We don’t want anyone to go to bed without eating anything, that’s why we started initiatives like this,” Phalatse explained.
She also used the day to do a walkabout around Pennyville to find out challenges that the residents are facing.
Phalatse added that the City has established opportunity centers to get young people involved in agriculture and train them to be commercial farmers.
“We are working on changing the face of agriculture. We want young people to take farming as a career and fight against poverty in their families and communities, that’s why we have centres such as Transformation Development Centre in Westbury that educate and train young people about farming and agro-processing,” she said.
Cllr Phalatse wrapped up the event by visiting the City’s overnight shelter in Hillbrow were she spoke to hundreds of homeless about the services available in the City to help them.
World Food Day is commemorated annually around the world on 16 October in remembrance of the founding the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations in 1945 as a body that deals with global food and agricultural issues. This year’s theme was “Achieving zero hunger is not only about addressing hunger”.
Written by Takalani Sioga
