MEC supports food garden

AGRICULTURE and rural development MEC, Joy Matshoge, recently showed her support to the St Matthews Anglican Church’s food garden in Seshego zone 1.

Matshoge started her visit by attending the church service and thereafter visited five impoverished families in the area to hand-over gardening starter kits, which included seeds and fertilisers needed to start food gardens.

“We encourage every household to start a food garden. With such a garden, you can grow vegetables in your back yard instead of buying them from supermarkets,” she said.

The visit formed part of an ongoing programme by the department to encourage Limpopo households to meet their own food security needs.

Matshoge used the visit to let local food security programmes know that the department was willing to work with them.

“We are here to encourage the church in its noble work. The elders invited us and we decided to team up with them,” she said.

Matshoge said it was natural for the department to support food programmes because “this is the only department that works with food produce”.

She encouraged church members to continue in the spirit of volunteerism because “800 million people across the continent go to bed with empty stomachs every day”.

A representative of the church’s Mothers’ Union, Evelyn Sebake, said they decided to start food gardens behind the church to take the vegetables to impoverished families, some of which the church had adopted.

“Surviving without money is harder in towns than in rural areas, because in rural area you can fully depend on subsistence farming whereas towns are more expensive to live in.

“This is why we were encouraged to plant vegetables such as spinach to donate to poor families,” Sebake said.

The MEC urged local municipalities to donate uninhabited land and dam water to local food projects.

In response to Sebake’s plea for more land, Matshoge said the municipality had land that could be used for these projects.

“We must also be allowed to draw water to fuel our vegetables,” Sebake stressed.

Businesswoman, Mboya Simango, pledged to donate R10 000 to the initiative.

In addition to the four families in Seshego, the MEC also visited the Shalati Drop-in Centre in Seshego zone 3.

“We believe that while we still have mothers in our society, we should not have orphans. The church adopted some families in the community and we have made it our number one duty to protect and feed children,” Mothers’ Union facilitator, Maite Monyai said.