PHILIPPINES: Sustainable Farming Cushions El Nino’s Bite

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Pinky Serafica

KIDAPAWAN, Philippines, May 6 1998 (IPS) - Nelson Perez thanks the day he decided, two years ago, to weed out synthetic inputs from the farm he tends in his village in the southern Philippines.

Perez’s decision has meant his family’s ability to continue to feed itself at a time when well over 200,000 families in Mindanao, the country’s resource-rich southern island, face dire problems with food supply and availability due to an eight-month drought caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon.

Last week, the Red Cross said some 3.6 million people were adversely affected by the dry spell, which has been forcing people to eat poisonous wild yams, drying up wells and irrigation systems and undercutting harvests.

The Catholic Church is raising funds to help families affected by the drought. Some 800,000 hectares of agricultural land have been either destroyed or damaged by drought.

Like most farmers in Mindanao, Perez has not escaped damage from the drought. But he is luckier than some, because he has more than rice-planting to rely on for income and is able to feed his family with safe produce planted on their land.

His family, which lives in M’lang, west of Kidapawan town in the province of North Cotabato, has been able to have access to fish and vegetables, because Perez had switched from planting rice alone to vegetables too and improved his irrigation system.

“My neighbouring farmers laughed at me because they thought I became crazy, having converted my prime ricefield,” he recalls in an interview here recently,

From planting just rice, Perez says, “I enlarged the dikes and planted 10 different vegetables. I also installed a one-metre wide by one metre deep fishpond along the paddies.”

At the time, he had shuddered at the thought of a future when “chemicals entirely would make the plants grow, and not the soil any more”.

Perez’s investment in a more sustainable brand of agriculture gave his family an option to fall back on — fish and fast growing, water-retentive vegetables from diversified farms — when rice harvests, as has now happened, are hurt by bad weather.

“I have no fear even if my rice plants are infested or destroyed, because I would not use pesticides to control it. I still have other crops as source of income,” Perez says.

He does not hesitate to feed his family with the vegetables it grows, because his non-use of synthetic pesticides means there is no harmful run-off to harm other produce.

Besides, Perez calculates that he has earned more after diversifying his produce and weaning himself away from high- yielding varieties of rice that use many chemicals.

He used to spend 270 U.S. dollars for his 0.83-hectare ricefield to earn 1,200 dollars at the end of the year. “When I stopped using fertilisers, pesticides and high-yielding varieties, I earned 75,472 pesos (nearly 2,000 dollars) from a working capital of only 18,885 pesos (520 dollars),” Perez says.

In many ways, Perez is going against the usual state of things not just in the Philippines, but in many developing countries.

Although awareness about more sustainable forms of agriculture is rising, experts say the use of pesticides and synthetic chemicals remains widespread.

From 1986 to 1996, developed countries’ production and use of chemical fertilisers dropped. But production and consumption by developing countries, like China, India and Pakistan, have risen.

Though increased yields are often the key aim of many farmers, many say the immediate gains are soon undercut by problems over the longer term.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation attributes the 55 percent rise in the crop yield of developing countries from 1965 to 1976 to fertilisers. Yields did increase dramatically during this period, but tapered off later.

The Philippine Development Assistance Programme, a Filipino- Canadian NGO funding facility, notes that despite the common use of high-yielding varieties, “rice production (in the country) for the past 20 years has increased only by an insignificant 2.4 percent”.

Rice, the staple food of Filipinos, accounts for 84 percent of fertiliser use, the group notes.

“Farmers have lost control of their lives. They have become dependent on outsiders, like traders, for support,” says farmer Mulong Andalesio, who tends his farm in Sinayawan, Bukidnon province, also in Mindanao.

“Farmers keep on going back to the traders because they owe them money. If you borrow from traders, you have to get (the loan) in the form of seeds, fertilisers, pesticides,” he adds.

Andalesio was a tailor who turned to the land in the fifties, when life, he felt, was becoming tougher.

At the time, farmers used minimal synthetic inputs in rice farms that yielded 50 to 60 cavans per hectare — a mediocre harvest when compared to the chemical-fed and productivity- centered yields of a mimumum of 100 cavans per hectare that were to come in succeeding decades.

Farmers at first followed procedures taught by technicians of pesticide firms in using synthetic inputs, but it was too easy to increasingly rely on these external factors in farming. Recalls Andalesio: “After a while, people were just using (them) at will because the technicians stopped giving training.”

“You see, they themselves promoted the seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and they made money from the sales. So they just released fertilisers to farmers with no limit, since they were making a lot of profit,” adds Andalesio, who shifted to more sustainable farming in 1994.

What clinched Perez and Andalesio’s decisions to shift to more organic food production was long-term survival, apart from training by groups from university and Church-based agriculture experts.

In effect, the farmers were bucking a system that was making them not only poorer, but sicker too.

“My son, who used to spray massive pesticides, was always sick,” Andalesio recounts. “Worse, he got his children stick too since after eating he’d just lie down and sleep with them on the same mat.”

“Now that I’ve convinced him to shift (away from chemical pesticides), his kids have stopped coughing. And the money that would have been spent for medicine now goes to (buying) ice candy,” he points out.

Adds Perez: “Before, everything went to our creditors. Why, we even had to buy rice when we were the ones planting them. Now seeking the rice sacks here in my own home makes me sleep better.”