Hortas comunitárias, educação popular e segurança alimentar e nutricional: aprendizados e desafios com base em uma experiência.

Abstract

The food and nutritional issue is determined by the economic and social development model and brings up a complex and wide discussion that lately passes through the hunger issue – an issue that still plagues part of the world population, getting to the ways of food production, generation and destination of residues and the diverse aspects related to the people feeding practice. Considering the sociocultural aspects of feeding and for trusting the potential of the community garden as an educational strategy that seek for the promotion of Food and Nutritional Security and The Human Right to Adequate Food, a study about Community Garden based on an experience lived in the Outreach Program PINAB with theoreticmethodological elements of Popular Education will be shown in this work. Thenceforth, challenges, potentialities and meanings of the process of building the Community Garden were sought through the historical reconstitution of this experience. The investigative path was built from a descriptive qualitative research with emphasis in the action research perspective and there have been used three kinds of techniques in order to collect information that would make it possible to reach the objectives listed above: the bibliographic research, the discussion group and the documentary consultation. The participant subject of the research were chosen intentionally and the criteria was the active participation on the process of building the Community Garden of PINAB. After the reflecting upon the research, it can be seen that the Community Garden is a powerful strategy for the promotion of Food and Nutritional Security, in addition to being an educative and converting space, especially in the context reported here, since the food issue is seen as something beyond the prescriptive and biologist model. Therefore, based on this experience it can be concluded that the Community Garden “Boa Esperança” has led to learning and reflections upon the food system in which people are inserted and mainly about mobilization, popular participation and collective construction of new ways and possibilities of social change.