Justice for All Filipino Farmers: A Statement on the Kidapawan Massacre and the State’s Abandonment of Agriculture

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The National Movement for Food Sovereignty, a local affiliate of the Asia-Pacific Network for Food Sovereignty, and an alliance of small holder farmers, artisanal fishers, rural women, rural youth and other anti-neoliberal individuals and organizations, stand in solidarity with the victims of the Kidapawan Massacre. We strongly condemn the Philippine Government’s abhorrent actions last April 1, 2016. We are calling for immediate and long-term justice for all protesters, whose rights were blatantly violated and whose tragic situations were ignored.

We demand accountability from the government armed forces whose responsibility in the first place is to ensure that people’s rights are protected. At the same time, we are calling for a food production system wherein small producers are not left on society’s fringes to die of hunger.

A Tragic History

The Philippine agriculture has been made backward by a landed elite dominated government, which systematically neglects and abandons it, resulting to the peasantry’s further desolation. As if economic violence were not enough, Filipino farmers have also time and time again encountered state-perpetrated violent suppression and reaction.

Year Name Location Fatalities
1950 Maliwalu Massacre Maliwalu, Bacolor, Pampanga 21
1966 Culatingan Massacre Culatingan, Concepcion, Tarlac 7
1985 Escalante Massacre Escalante City, Negros Occidental 30
1987 Mendiola Massacre Manila City 13
1987 Lupao Massacre Lupao, Nueva Ecija 17
2004 Hacienda Luisita Massacre Hacienda Luisita, Tarlac 7

The table above illustrates the tragic history of the Filipino farmer’s struggle for land, food, and justice. Time and time again, the poor Filipino farmers have put forward their legitimate demands to the Philippine government. Yet instead of meting out social justice, the state has chosen to respond with armed violence – with the Mendiola and the Hacienda Luisita Massacres perhaps being the most prominent examples in recent history. By no means is the list complete, as there are surely more cases of such atrocities inflicted upon the peasantry that have been effectively kept under wraps or hidden in the guise of the government’s anti-insurgency programs.

Rampant Hunger and Protests

It is at this juncture that we found ourselves in when, once again, the state has turned its guns against its own citizens. As combined elements of the Philippine National Police and the Armed Forces of the Philippines shot at a crowd of poor and hungry farmers conducting a peaceful protest in Kidapawan City, we are again reminded of the degree of marginalization and oppression being imposed upon our small food producers.

In January 2016, a State of Calamity has been declared in the provinces of Mindanao due to the drought caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon. Damages to crops are estimated at around P3.6 million. Expectedly, most affected by this crisis have been poor farmers. According to DA estimates, 17,000 hectares of rice and corn land have been damaged by the drought and more than 20,000 farmers have been affected in Maguindanao alone. The damage to their crops is beyond repair, resulting to too much hunger and poverty.

Reports from the ground have revealed cases of farmers having to eat pig feed because they have nothing else, and of a farmer having committed suicide because of no yield. The drought has virtually taken away their source of livelihood, if not their source of subsistence. In the face of this crisis, the Philippine government has done nothing to genuinely address the needs of its primary food producers.

With the El Niño crisis having become a matter of life and death to farmers and their families, it is not surprising then that Mindanao farmers were moved into collective action. No less than 6,000 farmers rose up and blockaded the Cotabato-Davao Highway, denouncing state neglect, and demanding the local government to release 15,000 sacks of rice as calamity aid.

The blockade was already on its third day when the police and armed forces intervened. Instead of government assistance, what the hungry farmers received was a hail of gunfire. The ensuing chaos left at least 3 farmers dead, 87 missing, and 116 hurt – 18 of which are hospitalized, most of whom due to gunshot wounds. The remaining protesters are now held up in a nearby church that has granted them refuge, yet security forces still continue to harass them and have even resorted to cutting off the building’s electricity in the middle of the night. Of course, the military is defending its action by accusing protesters of instigating the chaos. Yet, nothing can justify such violent act against an unarmed group of protesters with a very legitimate demand.

Hunger, Rural Poverty, and State Abandonment

The marginalization of the peasantry is a natural product of the neoliberal economic order to which the Philippine economy is being fully integrated. Under this economic system, policies of deregulation, liberalization, and privatization were designed to shift away from government subsidy in order to freely facilitate profit extraction by corporate business and financial institutions. These neoliberal policies have proven devastating to the Philippine economy, specifically agriculture and rural development. Philippine agriculture has been dramatically spiraling downward over the past decades with its GDP share steadily contracting. At the same time, its technological advancement has stagnated, with most of the farmlands still dependent on manual labor. Rural poverty continues to rise. Environmental degradation continues to worsen. Yet, the government has instead further pursued the same neoliberal policies causing rural poverty.

State abandonment of agriculture and rural development also manifests itself in terms of the government’s lack of emergency assistance and comprehensive rehabilitation program for agriculture, which is the first victim of climate change. Until today, farmer victims of Typhoons Lando and Nona in Luzon remain unassisted and unsupported. As if this is not enough, farmlands in Nueva Ecija are now being plagued by army worms – commonly classified as climate change pests – resulting in widespread damage to crops and loss of capital. Despite the government’s claims that we are climate change ready, the government’s lack of action on the issue only proves otherwise. More importantly, however, this serves as another proof of the government’s insensitivity towards the needs of our food producers.

The neoliberal policy direction is made even more apparent in the development aggression projects being pursued by the Philippine government. Development aggression occurs when the state imposes ‘development’ projects on unwilling communities. The mining projects in the province of Zambales fit this description perfectly. Zambaleños have strongly opposed mining operations in the province citing their harmful impacts on the environment. For one, the mining operations have exacerbated the impacts of Typhoon Lando in the area – resulting in severe flooding of homes and rice fields. This has led to community’s resolve to barricade the mining area and demand the ouster of these mining firms. As usual, the people’s legitmate protest was also violently suppressed by the PNP resulting to injuries and illegal arrests of protesters.

This shooting in Kidapawan and the other examples mentioned here are clear manifestations of the generalized forms of state-violence currently being perpetrated against farmers and other small food producers. Bogus land reform programs, coupled with development aggression, as well as the lack of subsidy and support services make up the government’s policy of abandoning its peasantry and agriculture. It pushes the peasant class to the brink of existence. It is not simplistic to say then, that this whole situation was created solely by the Philippine government and its fixation with the neoliberal dogma.

Justice and Food Sovereignty

The Philippine government’s response to the legitimate demands of its farmers is beyond abhorrent. However, the general condition of Philippine agriculture is even more detestable as it perpetuates the cycle of violence being imposed upon the impoverished Filipino small food producers. We are living in a society with an agricultural sector that is so backward that our farmers remain in the quagmire of hunger and poverty.

Hence, we are calling for a food system that is just and sovereign. We call on everyone to join us in our fight for justice and food sovereignty.

We demand the Philippine government to:

  1. Free all protesters who were unjustly detained.
  2. Immediately investigate and prosecute all police units/forces and government officials involved in the Kidapawan Massacre.
  3. Immediately provide food assistance to El Niño farmer families at least one sack of rice per farmer-family until they recovered from the El Niño crisis.
  4. Stop withholding food and aid to farmers and hold local government accountable for this crime against the farmers.
  5. Indemnify all victims of the Kidapawan Massacre and their families.
  6. Provide financial assistance to farmers for the recovery of their livelihood and rehabilitation of their farmlands.
  7. Implement genuine agrarian reform; stop resource grabbing.
  8. Stop the unabated plunder and excessive exploitation of the ecosystems in the Philippines.

 

Initial Signatories:

South Asian Network for Social & Agricultural Development (SANSAD)

Comité catholique contre la faim et pour le développement (CCFD) -Terre Solidaire

Mokatil-Movimentu Kamponezes Timor Leste (Timor Leste Farmers movement)

North South Initiative (NSI)

Jagrata Juba Shangha (JJS)

Progresibong Alyansa ng Mangingisda sa Pilipinas (PANGISDA)

Katipunan ng Bagong Pilipina (KABAPA)

Pambansang Kilusan ng Makabayang Magbubukid (PKMM)

Pagkakaisa Labab sa Liberalisasyon sa Agrikultura (PALLAG)

Nagkakakaisang Samahan ng Kababaihan sa Kanayunan (NAGSAKKA)

MAKABAYAN-Pilipinas

Center for Grassroots Studies and Social Action

SEAFISH for Justice

Koalisi Rakyat untuk Keadilan Perikanan (KIARA)

Damayan ng mga Manggagawa,Mangingisda at Magsasaka (DAMMMBA)

Pambansang Kaisahan ng mga Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (PKMP)

Dunong at Dangal ng Makabagong Dumagat (DUMAGAT)

Regeneration International

 

Closing the Carbon Cycle

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Fossil fuel companies and the beef industry have the potential to slow climate change – if they collaborate, and realize the waste of oil is the manna of soil, argues filmmaker Peter Byck during a talk in Phoenix at GreenBiz 16.

 

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The Most Important Speech On Climate Change

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Produced by Rob Herring and Ryan Wirick – Earth Conscious Films
Featuring The Carbon Underground. Full length film in production titled The Need To GROW.
Music by C.A. Gabriel

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Carbon farming is a zero-risk strategy for curbing climate change

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Author: David Wolfe

Now that 195 nations, including the U.S., have agreed to ambitious greenhouse gas emission reductions to slow the pace of climate change, the question everyone is asking is: How will we actually meet our targets set for 2035?

Given past performance, many don’t think we will get there without so-called “geoengineering” solutions, such as blasting sulfur dioxide or other particles into the atmosphere to shade the planet and compensate for the warming effect of greenhouse gases. Clever, eh? Maybe not. Some recent modeling studies show these seemingly easy fixes could backfire in catastrophic ways, such as disrupting the Indian monsoon season and completely drying out the Sahel of Africa. Another risk is atmospheric chemical reactions that deplete the ozone layer. Do we really want to run global-scale experiments for 20 or 30 years and see what happens?

There is another way, one that is zero-risk and builds on something farmers around the world are already motivated to do: manage soils so that a maximum amount of the carbon dioxide plants pull out of the air via photosynthesis remains on the farm as carbon-rich soil organic matter. “Carbon farming,” as it is sometimes called, is Mother Nature’s own geoengineering, relying on fundamental biological processes to capture carbon and sequester it in the soil, carbon that would otherwise be in the air as the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

Over the past century soils worldwide have been degraded due to expansion of agriculture and poor soil management. Today, there is a revolution in agriculture that recognizes the importance of building “healthy” soils by replacing the organic matter that has been lost over time. One way to do this is to use carbon- and nutrient-rich organic sources of fertilizers such as manure or compost rather than synthetic chemical fertilizers. Another is to include carbon- and nutrient-rich crops like legumes (e.g., peas, beans) in rotations, and plant winter cover crops that contribute additional organic matter in the off-season. We’ve also discovered that reducing the amount of plowing and tilling of the soil (“conservation tillage”) slows the microbial breakdown of organic matter that leads to carbon dioxide emissions from soils.

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Farmland Could Help Combat Climate Change

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Author: Bobby Magill

The earth’s soil stores a lot of carbon from the atmosphere, and managing it with the climate in mind may be an important part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to curb global warming, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“Climate-smart” soil management, primarily on land used for agriculture, can be part of an overall greenhouse gas reduction strategy that includes other efforts like carbon sequestration and reducing fossil fuel emissions, the paper’s authors said. Many scientists believe new efforts to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are needed to keep global warming to an internationally agreed-upon limit of 2°C (3.6°F).

“One way to do that is by locking up carbon in soils,” said study co-author Pete Smith, professor of soils and global change at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. “If we can do this, we can complement efforts in other sectors to stabilize the climate and deliver on the Paris agreement.”

About three times the carbon currently in the atmosphere is stored in the Earth’s soil—up to 2.4 trillion metric tons, or roughly 240 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels annually.

Much of that is locked up in land used for agriculture. Cropland soil stores atmospheric carbon in organic matter such as manure, roots, fallen leaves and and other pieces of decomposing plants. It doesn’t remain there permanently. It takes decades for the organic matter in the soil to decompose, and the carbon stored within is eventually emitted back into the atmosphere as gas. Soil is responsible for 37 percent of global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, according to the paper.

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Carbon Farming: Hope for a Hot Planet

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Author: Brian Barth

Michael Pollan deemed it agriculture’s “secret weapon” in a December op-ed for the Washington Post. Bill McKibben, in his praise for an upcoming book on the topic, described carbon farming as “a powerful vision,” one that he hopes will “presage major changes in our species’ use of the land.” Paul Hawken went so far as to call it “the foundation of the future of civilization,” with potential to “surpass the productivity of industrial agriculture.”

Why all the hubbub? And, for that matter, what exactly is it about?

Carbon farming is agriculture’s answer to climate change. Simply put, the goal is to take excess carbon out of the atmosphere, where the element causes global warming, and store it in the soil, where carbon aids the growth of plants. The principle is pretty straightforward—the practice, not so much.

Most folks understand that burning fossil fuels puts carbon that was once buried deep beneath the earth into the atmosphere, turning the planet into one big greenhouse in the process. But in addition to petroleum underground, the soil on the surface of the earth contains a sizable store of carbon in the form of organic matter—the stuff that environmentally aware farmers and gardeners are always striving to maximize. Plants add organic matter to the soil when they decompose, and photosynthesis, by definition, removes carbon dioxide from the air and pumps it through the roots of plants and into the soil.

Concern over climate change may have thrust the concept of carbon farming into the limelight—25 countries pledged to pursue it during the December climate talks in Paris—but ranchers like Gabe Brown, who raises livestock and an array of crops on 5,000 acres outside Bismarck, North Dakota, have preached its virtues for decades. “All soil biology eats carbon, and that’s how nutrients cycle,” explains Brown of the network of microbes and fungi and earthworms underground. “Farmers need to think of carbon as their fertilizer, because it’s what drives a healthy system.”

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Study says climate change pushes fish toward poles, threatening food source for poor

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Author: Chris Arsenault

TORONTO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Climate change is pushing fish toward the planet’s North and South poles, robbing traditionally poorer countries closer to the Equator of crucial natural resources, U.S. biologists said in a study published on Wednesday.

Key species of fish are migrating away from temperate zones and toward the poles as global temperatures rise, according to a research team from Rutgers University, Princeton University, Yale University and Arizona State University.

The migration patterns of fish, a critical food source for millions of people, are likely to exacerbate inequality between the world’s poor and rich, they said.

The world’s wealthier areas tend to be in cooler regions closer to the poles.

“Natural resources like fish are being pushed around by climate change, and that changes who gets access to them,” said Malin Pinsky, one of the study’s authors and a marine biologist, in a statement.

The study, published on Wednesday in the journal “Nature Climate Change,” used data on fish migration patterns along with a mathematical formula that tracked the movement of natural resources and shifts in wealth.

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Could Eating Less Meat INCREASE Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

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Author: Kathy Voth

OK – We’ve all heard it. Eating less meat is better for the planet. Why? Well, there’s research showing that 1) meat production has a big carbon footprint; and 2) ruminants emit lots of methane in farts, burps and manure and this is a problem because methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But like most things in life, this is a complex issue, and the results of recent research indicate that at least in one region of the world, eating less meat might increase global greenhouse gas emissions.

According to research by University researchers at Scotland’s Rural College and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, reducing beef production in the Brazilian Cerrado could increase global greenhouse gas emissions. Lead researcher Rafael Silva explains the reasons this way:

“Much of Brazil’s grassland is in poor condition, leading to low beef productivity and high greenhouse gas emissions from cattle. However, increasing demand for meat provides an incentive for farmers to recover degraded pastures. This would boost the amount of carbon stored in the soil and increase cattle productivity. It would require less land for grazing and reduce deforestation, potentially lowering emissions.”

The findings published in the January issue of the journal Nature Climate Change indicate that if demand for beef is 30 per cent higher by 2030 compared with current estimates, net emissions would decrease by 10 per cent. Reducing demand by 30 per cent would lead to 9 per cent higher emissions, provided the deforestation rates are not altered by a higher demand.

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Clearing Forests May Transform Local—and Global—Climate

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Author: Judith Schwartz

In the last 15 years 200,000 hectares of the Mau Forest in western Kenya have been converted to agricultural land. Previously called a “water tower” because it supplied water to the Rift Valley and Lake Victoria, the forest region has dried up; in 2009 the rainy season—from August to November—saw no rain, and since then precipitation has been modest. Whereas hydropower used to provide the bulk of Kenya’s power ongoing droughts have led investors to pull out of hydro projects; power rationing and epic blackouts are common. In a desperate move to halt environmental disaster by reducing population pressure, the Kenyan government evicted tens of thousands of people from the land.

Severe drought, temperature extremes, formerly productive land gone barren: this is climate change. Yet, says botanist Jan Pokorny of Charles University in Prague, these snippets from Kenya are not about greenhouse gases, but rather the way that land-use changes—specifically deforestation—affect climate; newly tree-free ground “represents huge amounts of solar energy changed into sensible heat, i.e. hot air.” Pokorny, who uses satellite technology to measure changes in land-surface and temperatures, has done research in western Kenya for 25 years, and watched the area grow hotter and drier. The change from forest cover to bare ground leads to more heat and drought, he says. More than half the country used to be forested; it’s now less than 2 percent.

Each year Earth loses 12 million to 15 million hectares of forest, according to the World Wildlife Fund, the equivalent of 36 football fields disappearing per minute. Although forests are ebbing throughout the world, in Africa forest-climate dynamics are easily grasped: according to the United Nations Environmental Programme, the continent is losing forests at twice the global rate. Says Pokorny, the conversion of forest to agricultural land, a change that took centuries in Europe, “happened during one generation in western Kenya.” Pokorny’s work, coupled with a controversial new theory called the “biotic pump,” suggests that transforming landscapes from forest to field has at least as big an impact on regional climate as greenhouse gas–induced global warming.

After all, de-treeing the landscape alters the way ecosystems function and self-regulate. For Pokorny, the key is evapotranspiration, whereby plants continuously absorb and emit water in the form of vapor. Evaporation consumes heat and thus has a cooling effect. He calls this “the perfect and only air-conditioning system on the planet.” On a moderately sunny day, a tree will transpire some 100 liters of water, converting 70 kilowatt-hours of solar energy into the latent heat held in water vapor. When soil is bare and dry—paved over or harvested—the process comes to a halt. The sun hits and warms the ground directly.

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How Carbon Farming Could Reverse Climate Change

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Author: Vera Liang Chang 

As the climate crisis heats up, agriculture is in the hot seat, not only as a contributor to climate change, but also as a potential solution. Eric Toensmeier has spent the last several years tracking both. A lecturer at Yale University, a senior fellow with Project Drawdown, and the author of several books on permaculture, Toensmeier is also the author of the newly-released book, The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security.

Toensmeier argues that when combined with immense reduction in fossil fuel emissions and adaptation strategies, carbon farming has the potential to return the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to the “magic number” of 350 parts per million, while feeding people, building more fertile soils, and contributing to ecosystem health.

We spoke with Toensmeier about his thoughts on agroforestry, what happened at the climate summit in Paris, and what strategies farmers, communities, and governments can take to launch carbon farming projects. This conversation has been edited for brevity.

When did you start working on carbon farming and why?

In 2009, I read the book Now or Never. Author Tim Flannery wrote that we need to mitigate climate change and a good way to do that is planting forests. But we can’t plant enough forests because we need land for agriculture. I thought to myself: there are trees that are agriculture; perhaps I have a contribution to make.

You note that agroforestry and perennial staple crops—strategies with immense potential to sequester carbon—have been given little attention to date. Why is that?

There are good reasons to focus on lower-sequestration strategies like no-till, organic annual cropping, and managed grazing. They don’t require farmers to make big changes to what they do, they don’t require people to change their diets, and they don’t require us to add unfamiliar foods to our food system. For example, an animal raised in a managed grazing system is raised differently than in a conventional system, but the cheese is still more or less the same. Moving into a fully perennial system would require fundamental transformation of our food system, from development to technologies. The notion that agriculture can incorporate trees—let alone the notion that agriculture be based on trees—is still new for most of us. Agroforestry produces only a tiny percentage of our food in the U.S.

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