Ricing to the occasion: An introduction to solutions development localization in the Philippine agricultural sector
Spoiler alert! Solutions actually must sprout from the ground.
Article written by Jedd Ong
Global warming trends have left our (global and local) food security prospects in dire straights. A special report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attributes 23% (or 4.5–5 billion tonnes) of global yearly carbon dioxide emissions to agriculture, deforestation, and land development activities.
This coincides with the fact that global food production rates have been increasing rapidly over the past 60 years, with net agricultural yields increasing by over 240% over that same time period, due to a mix of evolving technologies, and growing population demands.
This combination of steadily increasing food production demands — we need approximately 7,400 trillion additional calories’ worth of food by the year 2050 — and increasing land development and deforestation rates, alongside the widespread use of aggressive, scale-focused agricultural technologies, have resulted in increasing rates of land degradation. “Land degradation” in this case primarily refers to decreases in a land-mass’s “productive capacity” — otherwise known as the ability for said land mass to support and produce biological life (e.g. plants, livestock, human life).
The emergence of intensive agricultural techniques in particular — such as the widespread use of agro-chemicals and industrial-grade pesticides, fossil fuel-intensive harvesters, trucks, and cultivators, or groundwater-prone factory farming methods — have been singled out as substantive drivers of agricultural land deteriorations and greenhouse gas emissions. A 2014 study prepared by the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris proved a significant negative statistical correlation between land use intensity and soil biodiversity, for starters.
The use of industry-grade fertilizers additionally have been known to pollute key bodies of water, one of the more recent of which was traced back to the Gulf of Mexico just this August. Reports made by marine ecologists in the affected areas found out that approximately 18,006 square kilometers of water area in the gulf were found to be deoxygenated “marine dead zones” (i.e. incapable of supporting aquatic or basic human life).
Primary catalysts were found to be fertilizer and manure run-offs from pesticides and chemicals used in large-scale farms near the Gulf. Fertilizer and manure run-offs in this case, are considered harmful to many marine ecosystems because of a phenomenon known as nutrient pollution. Nutrient pollution refers to the excess exposure of an ecosystem to elements such as nitrogen and phosphorus — elements heavily found in fertilizers and manure — which encourages the rapid growth and generation of aquatic organisms such as algae at the expense of other marine life.
There are also external risks to our current food production chains. For starters, a different IPCC report commissioned last September 2019 again pointed out that given current greenhouse gas and carbon emission trends (the vast majority of it industrial emissions), the Earth is on track to breach the 1.5 °C warming targets set by the UN and the Paris Agreement before 2030. Such a breach would have catastrophic consequences on global food security, be it through extreme flooding in many low-level farmlands, and extreme droughts, or projected lower yields in staple food crops such as maize, rice, and corn in key worldwide production areas (e.g. sub-Saharan Africa, South and Central America, and South and Southeast Asia). We haven’t even touched upon the various economic effects of such shortages (not to mention the current food-related economic issues being faced by governments all over the globe today).
The sort of good news in the midst of all this, however, is that the world is not lacking in terms of sustainable farming and sustainable food production solutions. There’s a wide range of options to be had, be it the promotion of “organic” (e.g. non-genetically modified, non-pesticide-laden) produce, the promotion of natural self-sustaining food production systems (e.g. using semi-submerged rice fields to simultaneously raise other aquatic and amphibious life, such as fish and ducks), genetic engineering (Philippine-developed high-yield, disease-resistant IR8 “miracle” rice seedlings comes to mind here, albeit not without its share of political controversy), urban farming, and heritage crop diversification, just to name a few.
The challenge however, as it generally happens to be with most agricultural issues, is adjusting these broad-based solutions to the more specific needs of a certain geographic area. The Philippines is a perfect case study for this problem. Our country has, at least for the past 30–40 years, been a leading pioneer in the field of rice science and research. The International Rice Research Institute based in Los Banos, Laguna, has been the site of some of the most progressive steps forward in terms of plant genetics research and solutions generation. The institute, for starters, pioneered the world’s first high-yielding rice crop variety during the 1970s Green Revolution. It has, as recently as last 2018, additionally continued to pilot and develop flood and drought-tolerant, as well as blight-resistant rice varieties. This, all within the Philippines’ own backyard, while the country remains one of the world’s largest rice importers.
There are three key takeaways we want you to yield from such findings: 1) that agricultural production as we know it today is more often than not, wasteful and harmful for the environment, 2) that fortunately, solutions to the current problems faced by intensive, large-scale food and agriculture production clearly exist, and 3) that all having been said, that such current problems — as illustrated by the Philippine rice sector’s case — may be mere symptoms of a much larger institutional problem, namely: administrative mismanagement of public agricultural sectors.
To again tie things back to the Philippine context, note here the following with respect to our local rice production issues: 1) local and international agricultural economists have no less than three times within the past 20 years pinpointed the following common causes of our local rice sector’s underperformance, namely: high input costs for farmers, lack of capital support, and lack of proper irrigation facilities, 2) that the Department of Science and Technology has consistently ranked in the lower 10–15% of government offices when it comes to annual budget allocations for the past two to three years, and 3) that while the Department of Agriculture has consistently had one of the highest budget allocations in the current administration for the same time period, the Department has repeatedly been dogged by a damning set of controversies and mismanagement allegations over the same time period.
Recent examples of such mismanagement include: food safety mismanagement accusations due to the African Swine Flu outbreak between local hogs, the controversial declaration by former Department of Agriculture Secretary Manny Pinol that last year’s rice shortage was “fake news”, and the fact that allegations exist that many of the programs and initiatives passed by the department are often devised without strategic input from key local government and administrative unit heads.
That having been said, given that the thrust of this page is to provide smarter climate change mitigation solutions and educational materials, we still need to try to provide a neat little conclusion to these many facts. And that conclusion, simply put, lies in the one binding principle that ties together both issues mentioned above regarding misgivings within the local agriculture governance, and the many “sustainable” farming solutions depicted a few paragraphs earlier: decentralization.
Broadly speaking, “decentralization” here primarily refers to a two-step process: 1) the redistribution of decision making powers from state executive branches, with respect to the sourcing of agricultural solutions, leading hopefully to 2) a broader industry movement towards co-opting more localized, and more self-contained food production systems — both in urban and rural areas.
First, with respect to power redistribution — it bears noting again that the primary argument of this essay is that we do not lack solutions to the ever growing problems caused by intensive agricultural processes; we lack the ability to deploy and critically select which solutions are most applicable to our local environments. For those looking for more concrete examples, former National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) director and Inquirer columnist Ciel Habito has a few wonderful columns (linked here) on the following “redistribution-themed” topics: administrative and statistical reforms for crop forecasting, resource diversification towards non-rice crops and livestock development efforts, and an argument for the scaling back of Department of Agriculture efforts in the fields of technology development and distribution.
In fact, it’s actually that last article linked that inspires the bulk of our discussion. More than exploring means to better extol the virtues of miracle rice, for example, or debate with local farmers on the inherent health benefits of back-to-basics organic farming methods, the one thing that sticks out from all the research I’ve gathered throughout this essay is how little input there seems to be from the small-scale practitioners most heavily affected by the interventions (and problems) we’re identifying and proposing. This is particularly mollifying when understanding that the practice of agriculture, while heavily industrialized, requires a certain level of intimacy with the terrain in which one must harvest.
As such, this particular solution, while not perhaps as technological or as specific, bears noting if only because it at least addresses an easily identifiable gap in the means by which we discuss “agriculture” and its related problems and solutions. Such also reduces the (admittedly immense) pressure placed on institutions such as the Philippines’ Department of Agriculture, by allowing it to focus on processing bottom-up insights gained by local partners, rather than having to account for the immense task of cleaning, centralizing, verifying, and operationalizing insights garnered from across the country. It (theoretically) cuts both mental and financial strain, in short.
And speaking of financial strain — it also bears noting that much like what was touched upon in brief a while ago, innovation is costly and while available in principle, is not readily co-optible in many key economies and countries such as the Philippines (due to various political hurdles, technical hurdles, etc.). And while such hurdles cannot guarantee that the standardized implementation of so-called “natural solutions” (such as self-contained farming procedures) will fare better, the cost savings alone, we’d like to argue, give it a much better shot.
Cost savings in this case we must note, does not only include actual monetary savings but also resource savings, in terms of the space needed to facilitate such a set-up (usually just the introduction of key locally-available livestock/marine life rather than hard-up capital), and the capital-intensity of such a set-up (again see previous point).
Such theoretical space-savings (and a mindset geared towards yield efficiency rather than top-down target fulfillment), also then would leave agricultural practitioners with more room to experiment and scale-up common-sense resource conservation methods, such as hydroponics, for example. And if you need real life examples, note that such emphasis on self-contained agricultural techniques has brought worldwide recognition to the Netherlands — as both one of the top per-square meter tomato producers, and one of the least water reliant.
To conclude and reiterate a few key points: let this discussion not distract from the fact that food security wise, business-as-usual in the agriculture sector will not cut it anymore. Remember again that global warming trends have left our (global and local) food security prospects in dire straights, and that the IPCC attributes 23% (or 4.5–5 billion tonnes) of global carbon dioxide emissions per year to agriculture, deforestation, and land development activities.
That having been said, while business-as-usual promises us nothing but dire straights for the years to come, there is no shortage of viable solutions. There’s again a wide range of options to be had, be it the promotion of “organic” (e.g. non-genetically modified, non-pesticide-laden) produce, the promotion of natural self-sustaining food production systems (e.g. using semi-submerged rice fields to simultaneously raise other aquatic and amphibious life, such as fish and ducks), genetic engineering (Philippine-developed miracle rice comes to mind here), urban farming, and heritage crop diversification, for starters.
The ultimate problem (and solution) — lies in our ability to localize situations to our various, highly differing area make-ups. Our own long-standing technical and public administration management struggles with rice self-sufficiency proves that theory compelling enough.
Thus, rather than provide any one technical commitment to a broad-based solution, perhaps then it is better for us to reassess the means by which we are able to benchmark and define agricultural sector “progress.” Progress after all is often defined (at least based on sources researched) by a state or organization’s ability to “keep up with the times” — that is mimic developed economies’ reliance on state-of-the-art technologies. But more than progress in the strictest of technological terms, it still bears reminding that tackling the problem of “food security” and agricultural imbalance is very much a community-driven “security” problem as it is a food production one. And therein ultimately is where the solutions should — at least in our humble opinion — lie.
After all, if there’s one thing that political power redistribution, public administration reform in agriculture, or even the guided creation of self-contained food systems have in common as food security and industrialization solutions, it’s that they allow People, and not machines, the opportunity to “rice” to the occasion of securing their future.
