Soaring Food Prices in Brazil Lead Many to Take Up Urban Farming

RIO DE JANEIRO—As a teenager in the Manguinhos slum community in northern Rio de Janeiro, Leonardo Ferreira said he used to spend his mornings packaging cocaine between shootouts with the police.

Now, he tends to his lettuce in the favela’s vast vegetable garden, one of thousands of urban farms that have sprung up across Brazil’s poorest communities, as residents from grandmothers to drug traffickers resort to growing their own food amid soaring prices.