We need to make agriculture our top priority

According to the International Food Policy Research Institute, about one billion people globally are poor and about 800 million people are hungry.

In the Philippines, the latest survey of the Social Weather Stations (SWS) shows that while the country’s poverty rate dropped at the end of 2011, the number of Filipinos who experienced hunger went up during the same period.

Severe hunger among poor families jumped by eight points from 5.5 percent in September and also 9.1 percent from the 6.9 percent among the food-poor. Moderate hunger went up to 25.6 percent from 22.4 percent and increased to 29 percent from 24.2 percent among the food-poor. Overall, SWS says that the rate of hunger is steady in Luzon and Metro Manila, but increased in the Visayas and Mindanao.

In 2010, SWS president Dr. Mahar Mangahas said that nothing significant has happened to address the hunger problem for a long period of time. If the trend continues how could we achieve the UN Millennium Development Goal of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2015?

We still have people (children and adults) begging for food. You see a lot of scavengers waiting for food thrown out from restaurants and food chains. The poor continue to commit crime just to put food on the table. School-aged students go to school with empty stomachs. The ‘quick fix’ (i.e. conditional cash transfer) programs initiated by the government are not enough. Yes, it may help people for a ‘moment’ but it will not help them for a lifetime.

We must take Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher’s words seriously when he says, “Give a man a fish; feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish; feed him for a lifetime”.

We are all aware of the many causes of hunger. Therefore, we should take an integrated approach when finding solutions to food shortages and even nutritional problems. The government should focus on the root cause so that they can come up with programs that can provide long-term solutions to hunger.

Agriculture is the mainstay of our Philippine economy. The government should pay attention to this. Our farms/ fields need nourishment in order to produce healthy and bountiful harvests. We need to strengthen our knowledge on Horticulture.

As the years go by we see a significant decline in the youth having interest in agriculture. Nowadays, it is difficult to find a graduate of agriculture who can teach – someone who can inspire students to love plants and animals. Our agriculture colleges and universities have not been producing students who can earnestly bring this industry back to its prime. Ironically, most graduates prefer to work in offices than in gardens or farms. The government, on the other hand, has not given proper support and importance to this field.

I attended a symposium last week called, “Foodture”. One of the speakers, Heinz Gisel reminded us how God has blessed this archipelago with wondrous natural riches. He said that Filipinos must develop and optimize these resources, not just for ourselves but for the entire world.

In the same symposium, a good friend Tito Osias who heads an NGO that encourages countryside entrepreneurship called Balik-Probinsya, Inc. urges Filipinos to have an ‘opportunity-discernment’ rather than ‘employment-dependency’ mindset. He said, “For too long, Filipinos have been taught by colonial masters and selfish leaders to depend on being employed for their survival livelihoods. But rather than being benevolent, many employers turned out to be greedy tyrants, exploiting employees into poverty and misery. Urbanization further alienated Filipinos from their land and as globalization opened doorways to the rest of the world, the poor Filipino employee failed to appreciate the huge potentials that lay all around him at home, eventually joining other overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).”

He pointed out that, “In the last 30 years, OFWs kept the Philippines afloat with regular dollar remittances and costly family sacrifices. Lacking sufficient awareness, start-up capital and market access, the Filipino had few options but employment and slavery. That was THEN. Today, Foodture and BalikProbinsiya stand as hopeful portents for the future as both these advocacies expand Filipino awareness. Also, Foodture promises market access and offers a clear sign that the time of the Philippines is dawning as a world supplier of food and other goods and services even as BalikProbinsiya is already gathering and organizing Industry Advocates (IAs) and Area Convenors (ACs) to help Entrepreneurship-Champions (ECs) convert raw Philippine resources into finished products and personal services required by Foodture.”

Examples of BalikProbinsiya’s initiatives include revitalizing the coconut industry (starting with Lawrence Lim’s development of its tuba sub-group with cocosugar and lambanog), catalyzing a sunrise bamboo industry (through the pioneering work of BAMBU sa PINAS, Inc. and its president, Romualdo L. Sta. Ana) among others.

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In Iloilo City, philanthropist Maria Teresa Chan of the San Antonio Foundation and Enhancement Center Foundation founded the “1 Meal Program” patterned after Cape Town, South Africa’s Streetsmart program that seeks to raise funds to give underprivileged or homeless children a chance to have a better life by providing not only food, but also educational opportunities.

The 1 Meal program collects funds from diners in participating restaurants for feeding programs and improving facilities in public schools. Every time anybody enjoys a meal at a participating restaurant, they have the opportunity to help. Customers are simply asked to leave a small donation of P5.00. This donation goes directly to the improvement of the public schools in Iloilo.

In the 11 months that the 1 Meal Program has been operating, over 2,000 public school students have been helped. Projects like providing running water and canteen for the students of S. Abeto Elementary School; feeding programs that will follow kindergarten students until they reach high school for the students of Uswag Extension of Judith L. Tiongco, Calahunan Elementary School, Bulilao and E. Juntado Elementary Schools which costs P12.00 a day per student (totaling to P648,000 a year or P4.5M until they reach high school) have been done among others.

In her first official visit to Iloilo, the Ambassador of South Africa to the Philippines, Agnes Nyamande-Pitso who initiated a move to solicit more funding for the 1 Meal, One Opportunity Program urged for stronger public-private partnership in alleviating poverty. She said, “As long as there is unemployment and people cannot eat, we need to work together to ease this social problem.”

Indeed, hunger is a social problem in this country. With all the rich natural resources in land and water around us why do we still have Filipinos dying of hunger?