At the end of June 2021, the Overstrand Executive Mayor handed over trays of beetroot, spinach, broccoli and onion seedlings in communities of the Greater Gansbaai area. This will give more residents the opportunity to fight food insecurity by growing food for their families in their own backyard.
Almost 600 community members in Masakhane, Blompark, Pearly Beach and Stanford are beneficiaries of the seedlings for their home gardens.
These include people who have an existing vegetable garden, as well as those who indicated that they would like to start with the One Household one Garden programme. Community gardens also benefited from this handover.
On delivering his speech, Mayor Coetzee emphasised that the Covid-19 virus has had and will, for the foreseeable future, continue to have a devasting impact on the members of our community who, even before the start of the pandemic, found it difficult to put food on the table.
He said the pandemic has affected the most vulnerable members of our community most. For many the ability to simply feed their family has become an almost insurmountable task.
The Mayor then explained that Overstrand Municipality has moved the emphasis from supporting food kitchens which feed the communities, to assisting residents to do things for themselves by promoting a food garden in each home that can contribute towards putting food on the family’s table throughout the year.
“Through the distribution of these seedlings, purchased by the Municipality for our communities, we contribute to feeding the most vulnerable people in our communities and so fight malnutrition and boost our people’s immunity against illnesses,” he said.
Mayor Coetzee thanked Minister Ivan Meyer and the Department of Agriculture in the Western Cape, who, in collaboration with Overstrand’s Directorate of Local Economic Development (LED), declared themselves more than willing to help ensure that the community garden project we jointly initiated, would be successful.
The One Household One Garden project will be rolled out to the communities of Hermanus and Kleinmond during the course of the month.