The farming initiative promotes food independence in the country with the world’s oldest bread by converting unused urban land into productive wheat fields.
Carrying sickles, a group of Jordanians gather to harvest a wheat field that spreads around Amman’s City Mall. Logos of international supermarkets and franchises tower above the golden wheat, as dozens of people reap a crop that for thousands of years has been cultivated in the region.
This collective harvest last summer in west Amman’s affluent neighbourhood of glitzy shopping malls was part of a grassroots initiative promoting food sovereignty by converting unused land into wheat fields.
Named Al-Barakeh Wheat – which can be translated as “blessing” – the project took off in late 2019, when founders Lama Khatieb and Rabee Zureikat’s social enterprise Zikra for Popular Learning started growing wheat.
“Our first harvest was in the spring of 2020, in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic,” says Zureikat. Around that time, Jordan had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns. With a total ban on movement, food was distributed by government buses and trucks.
eople were standing in long queues waiting for bread to be distributed,” says Zureikat. “We harvested our wheat and started baking our own bread at home. We felt it was powerful being able to rely on ourselves, it was an amazing feeling.”
After successfully growing a tonne-and-a-half of wheat, Zureikat and Khatieb started locating empty plots of land in Amman and mobilising others to join their efforts to restore Jordan’s wheat fields and encourage Jordanians to grow their own food.
Since their first harvest in 2020, hundreds have joined the collective farming initiative, which teaches participants to cultivate wheat for an entire season and become self-sufficient in their wheat needs for a year.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
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