Rosario organization connects agroecological food producers with popular canteens

Connect dots. Think differently. Get out of the obvious answers and weave innovative answers to old problems. This is what a group of young professionals grouped in the organization Sustainable Technology Solutions (STS) of Rosario did in April 2020, a few weeks after the start of the pandemic and with all the restrictions of the moment. They devised a way to link what had been isolated from one day to the next: the need to sell from the agro-ecological producers of the Rosario periphery, without the possibility of doing so at the usual fairs, and the demand for food from popular canteens and picnic areas, which multiplied as time went by and the social crisis climbed.

Faced with this urgency, and after a brief virtual meeting between several of the STS members, in mid-April 2020, the program De la Huerta a la Olla (delahuertaalaolla.org.ar) was born, a solidarity channel managed by that organization that connects the vegetable growers of Rosario and surroundings with dining rooms and picnic areas of the city. It is financed by donations from individuals who can see in real time on an open access online dashboard how and where the money contributed is used.

“Shortly after the pandemic began, we saw that while the need for the canteens grew, there were dozens of producers who had food that they could not sell because the fairs had closed: the idea of connecting them and taking care of delivery logistics came out right away,” recall Cora Moyano, Lucila González, Nacho Zapata, Evelin Sehoane and Delfina Eckhart, two years after the first shipment.

“The pandemic crisis accelerated the questions we already had about our food production, distribution and consumption systems. With this program we try to give oxygen to responsible food production, fairer distribution and access to healthy food,” explained Nacho Zapata.

After 24 months of action, as of March of this year, the project had already collected almost 1.7 million pesos in donations thanks to the contribution of 214 people. With this silver, vegetables, eggs and chicken were purchased from 34 different producers in the Gran Rosario and more than 100 deliveries of fresh, agro-ecological and seasonal food were made to 21 dining rooms.

Socio-environmental awareness

For De la Huerta a la Olla (DHO) to exist, there had to be STS, an organization born and raised in the Faculty of Engineering of the National University of Rosario in 2009 with the idea of “generating socio-environmental awareness”. To that end, the founding group (predominantly male students or newly graduated from engineering degrees) focused on designing innovative solutions to some of the problems that life in a big city poses, with mobility and access to quality food as two of the main axes.

From that initial momentum emerged Carpoolear, the first Argentinean platform for sharing car rides (carpoolear.com.ar) whose objective was and continues to be to reduce polluting emissions and fossil fuel consumption by optimizing the use of the car by “filling” it with people going to the same place, at the same time.

At the same time, Rosario by bike (an app that promotes bicycles as a means of transport and serves as a guide for cyclists, with up-to-date information on bicycle lanes, bicycles, routes and public bike stations) and the Ecoalimentate site, which has, among other things, a map with businesses that offer agro-ecological and the social economy in the city.

Today the organization is made up of about 30 volunteers (12 of them are part of DHO) and its initial profile changed to another with strong participation of women and projects more focused on social matters than strictly technological ones. “What captivated me about STS is the horizontal, almost assembly way of working and making decisions. We believe in the idea of forming a community and operating on reality from that place,” says Cora Moyano, one of its members.

The initial seal linked to engineering training is still very present and is another source of pride: “We have procedures, we like to systematize information and workflow. And we use a lot of soft technologies,” adds Delfina Eckhart.

Transparency is key for the group. Therefore, within the framework of De la Huerta a la Olla, the publicly accessible dashboard that records donations is updated almost daily. The organization does not charge any commission.

The experience of a dining room

With Ecoalimentate as a background, De la Huerta a la Olla collectively reflects the individual concern that STS members have for food and its origin, quality and distribution. Therefore, from the beginning, the initiative aimed to buy Rosario's production of the agroecological vegetable gardener belt, largely as a result of an urban agriculture program implemented by local governments after the 2001 crisis, which was growing and which today supplies, still on a small scale, increasing consumption.

“From the outset, we decided that the food that was donated would be from agroecological producers, without agrochemicals; we focused on caring for the health of the environment and people,” explains Evelin Sehoane. For her, the fact that the city already had a floor promoting agro-ecological practices “helped the program get started quickly.”

At that point, there are some premises that, for STS, are not negotiable: betting on what is generated sustainably, on local circuits and seasonal products as a way of promoting local solutions and a certain return to a “common sense” for food (prioritizing the fresh, the near, the moment) that was completely erased by the big food industry. “We have moved away from what should be the norm when it comes to eating healthy. Big cities, big industries and everything ultra-processed have led us to that. The idea is to recover those short circuits,” says Nacho Zapata.

For the dining rooms, having this type of food is something new: “Once a month we get the help of the kids, they bring us vegetables — all organic — sometimes chicken, eggs; they help us a lot. That it is organic is a very nice thing, I didn't know it, I thought all vegetables were the same”, says Leidi Cuevas, from the Arco Iris dining room, located in the Alvear neighborhood, in the southwest of Rosario.

There, a group of volunteers and volunteers serve about 250 families in the area. “We have more people now than we did during the pandemic, which was when we started cooking,” adds Leidi. For her, having met De la Huerta a la Olla “was salvation”. “They taught us a lot of things, they gave us workshops, we visited organic gardens and we learned what orcharders do. It was important to get to know them, see them face to face and thus be able to value their work more”, he says.

The producer's gaze

Martín Montiel is a producer of agroecological wheat flour and is in charge of the La Carolina farm, located in the town of Piñero, about 30 kilometers from Rosario. He has spent years in fair trade networks and, within that framework, he has been working for a long time in collaboration with STS, from where they have helped him find technological solutions to carry out his work.

“We already knew each other and when DHO emerged, they knew that they could count on the agroecological wholemeal flour that we make in our flour mill,” says Montiel, for whom the project could be replicated in state initiatives, since “it prevents economic concentration and food from being left in the hands of a handful of large companies that dominate the market and prices.” For this reason, he insists, De la Huerta a la Olla is an example of “how the existence of small family production can be sustained based on an agro-ecological paradigm of short distribution, with the possibility of healthy consumption at good prices for sectors that usually do not have that possibility”.

Montiel added that family farming “does not stock to speculate on prices like big mills”, but produces daily with a high level of circulation “that does not allow either accumulation or concentration.” “Sustaining a production, distribution and consumption circuit such as the one proposed by this project should be a public policy,” he concludes.

Overcoming welfare

After two years of operation, DHO is a consolidated program, but one that wants to go for more. The objective is not only to address emergencies (lack of work, the need for food), but to advance the slow but persistent construction of another way of doing things, with socio-environmental sustainability as a flag. This means, in the first instance, attempting a leap in scale and consolidating a commercial circuit where locally produced agroecological products reach institutions with canteens more smoothly.

We also add activities that help us understand the topic from a more comprehensive perspective: “We have a nutritionist in the group because it is important to know what options each food offers, how to preserve it or if it can be frozen. We put together recipe books and workshops around that,” they explain from STS.

Another objective is to get the State to replace part of its purchases of food for schools, hospitals and nursing homes with agro-ecological production, giving producers a certain level of stability. “That would be healthier for everyone and would strengthen local work,” Zapata explains. In the future, the intention is that dining rooms that have space can add small gardens to start stocking up, at least in part, fresh vegetables. The idea is, Evelin summarizes, “to be less and less assistantialist and try, together, to move towards a more sustainable model from every point of view”.

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This note is part of the Solutions for Latin America platform, an alliance between INFOBAE and RED/ACTION.