FARMERS’ RIGHTS AND THE MINDANAO
AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT AGENDA
Southeast Asia Regional Initiatives for Community Empowerment (SEARICE)
Statement on the 1st Mindanao Agriculture Forum
November 21-23, 2007
It is not possible to conceive of an agenda for agricultural development without conceiving of an agenda for farmers and farmers' rights.
SEARICE has been working in Mindanao since 1992 when we started the Community Based Native Seeds Research Center (CONSERVE) in Pres. Roxas, Cotabato. CONSERVE itself was built from the local farmers' movement in Cotabato, which in turn had been nurtured mainly by the Church from the time of the anti-Marcos dictatorship struggles. We simply inherited and continued what had been started by local farmers as their struggle for a better life and for a fuller realization of their rights, politically, economically, culturally and socially.
Even then, when we started CONSERVE, we did not come with a full agenda for local agricultural development nor did we aspire to achieve one. We still don't claim to have one now. We came in with quite a simple idea: seeds. Yet even from that seemingly simple idea of seeds our years of work with farmers have taught us and eventually led us to a better appreciation of something broader than what we started out, and that is, farmers' rights. And this appreciation come through years of lessons, wisdom and struggles imparted to us by farmers themselves. Yet, we are not claiming expertise on the subject of farmers' rights. We do know enough however that there could not be an agenda for agriculture without farmers' and farmers' rights being central to the discussions.
What now appears to be obvious at this point in the 1st Mindanao Agriculture Forum: that it suffers from a gaping hole in its heart, the heart of farmers' rights! We are not merely saying that Farmers' Rights is the missing element here because that is the terrain of advocacy that we happen to be working in. We are saying so because this terrain has become global in significance, which we especially Mindanawans may ignore only at our own loss.
Recently, the second meeting of the Governing Body of the International Treaty of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), of which the Philippines is a signatory, took place in Rome early this month. The Treaty, which took effect in 2004 is the foremost international instrument governing discussions and negotiations among Parties with regard to policies about Plant Genetic Resources in Food and Agriculture. At the heart of the Treaty is Farmers' Rights, enshrined in Article 9.
It is an imperfect Treaty no doubt and the section on Farmers' Rights among its many imperfections. Farmers' movements themselves have criticized Farmers' Rights provision in the Treaty for, among others, the narrowness of its scope and to its being made subject to national legislation. Nevertheless, the Treaty remains the only one that explicitly recognizes Farmers’ Rights and calls upon countries to implement it. It is a historic Treaty and under ideal circumstances, is a work in progress.
For us at SEARICE, we came into the Rome meeting having conducted a series of consultations among farmers in Mindanao, Visayas and at the national level about Farmers' Rights. The objective of those consultations was to try to form a consensus among farmers about what they understand Farmers' Rights to be and the key issues that affect them.
What those consultations basically showed is that farmers consider Farmers' Rights as mainly a bundle of rights, or a collection of rights ranging from the economic to the political, from the social to the cultural. They are interlocking rights that define what a farmer is or what he or she ought to be in the eyes of society. Farmers regard their rights to land as a very basic right, hence the struggle for land reform, including in Mindanao, remains very much alive. The farmers from Sumilao, Bukidnon who are marching right now towards Malacanang are living proof of this struggle. But also important for farmers are their rights to seeds, i.e., unimpeded access to use, sell, share and market seeds. So too are rights to participation in government, to appropriate and safe technologies, to access to health care, to safe and nutritious food, to fair market access, among others. Indeed, what those consultations showed is that farmers do hold a holistic view of their rights and consequently of their role in society as a whole and in agriculture as a sector.
Farmers from South-Central Mindanao during the consultations particularly articulated the core issues that impede them from realizing and asserting their basic socio-economic,cultural rights. According to them, the so-called ‘development projects’ such as mining explorations and the expansion of agricultural plantations, in fact deduced farmers into mere tenants and/or daily laborers, has not only contaminated their lands and water system but also showered their communities with toxic sprays and in the process, disregarded their efforts to practice a more environment-friendly sustainable agriculture. Underlying issues behind this are the absence of comprehensive information dissemination for farmers to have informed decision and the lack of farmers’, local communities’ and women’s voices in decision-making processes at all levels.
Farmers during the consultation also lamented the seemingly lack of recognition for their efforts in conservation and sustainable management of the agroecosystem from the formal sector. On seeds/ plant genetic resources for example, farmer-partners of SEARICE in North Cotabato and Sultan Kudarat during the span of 1994-2006 have developed and bred some 110 rice varieties from local and traditional varieties that are adaptable and suited to their specific local conditions. In second cropping in 2006, about 42.6 tons from these seeds have spread to some 328 hectares in 21 farming communities in North Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat and Bukidnon, in the process increasing the varietal diversity in lowland rice farming communities. The Government thru the Department of Agriculture, however is bent on subsidizing and promoting only 5 varieties of hybrid seeds, further subjecting lowland agroecosystems more prone to disease and pest epidemics and also in promoting genetically modified crops whose long-term impacts to human and animal health and to the environment remains unknown. Moreover, these bias promotion of one-size fits all technologies undermines farmers’ conservation efforts and accordingly, further marginalizes their sector to become dependent and ‘tenants’ to what technology, inputs, seeds the scientists, government, traders, and seed companies prescribe and promote.
Albeit the lack of support, this did not hamper farmers from crafting their own development as forms of assertions of their rights – by organizing themselves into groups, networks and movements that freely exchange and share not only seeds and related knowledge, technologies and increasingly by engaging local government units and thru participation in special bodies at the community and local levels to protect and support their initiatives, among others. Farmers are showing the way, it is about time we let them lead the way to agricultural development.
Henceforth, we believe that Mindanao Agriculture Agenda should be defined by the farmers of Mindanao with active and diverse participation of different stakeholders particularly small farmers, indigenous peoples, rural youth and rural women. It is our call and our challenge to develop a Farmers’ Rights- based agenda for agricultural development in Mindanao - with Mindanawan farmers as central to the process of defining the agenda.
- End-
SEARICE Mindanao
Bautista Farms, Tacurong City
Sultan Kudarat
Telefax: +6364 477 0045; +632 922 6710
Email: searice@searice.org.ph, searice_mindanao@searice.org.ph
No comments:
Post a Comment