The local Mayor in Anda, Bohol seems to be interested in only one thing, at least in his interactions with myself and the organisation I am working with – how much funding we can bring in for them. Despite our repeated assertion that our project had nothing to do with providing or acquiring funding, it was a constant theme throughout our meetings and one that could be seen in the eyes of the Mayor in every interaction we had with him. These conversations would come up repeatedly throughout our several meetings and at times it seemed like he was not even listening to what we were saying. Hence the decision to limit his involvement but to still bring him and his office “along for the ride”.
These established roles are not to be sniffed at though. They are very real and they have not been created in a vacuum. The legacy of colonialism is evidently responsible and it affects and has affected not just how governments in developing countries interact with representatives from developed ones, but the fundamental and basic levels upon which people, regular community members, operate. There is not a strong incentive to be creative, as a statement by an anonymous council staff member suggests – ‘the West will come up with ideas, we will try it for a while and when it fails, we will just lay low for a couple of years until the next round of funding comes along, whether from AusAID, CIDA, JICA, USAID, DFID, it will come eventually’.
Our incentive to propose and implement projects to develop a local food system is thus based on the need to detach community development from external influence. Through certain means the community can grow food to feed themselves with decreasing amounts of labour, resulting in increased resiliency to climatic and economic shocks, while not being subject to corporate demands who ensure the use of certain chemical fertilisers, pesticides, fungicides etc. Numerous cases were observed whereby farmers were lured into contracts to grow crops for a market that will likely disappear in a year or two, when a new “super-food” is announced and a new country of interest comes into the equation. The global economy is a turbulent, transient, and unreliable source of income for local community development. The local economy is real, community-oriented and creates bonds that strengthen people’s livelihoods, families, communities and thus happiness. Building a local food movement is therefore of our utmost priority.
We may have been perceived in the local Mayor’s office as walking, talking sacks of cash but when we started talking to students, teachers, school principals and farmers, we were on their level. We are interested in growing food but in a way that increases the health and vitality of the soil, the land and thus the people in the community. We were met with enthusiastic agreement, with smiles, nods and applause all round. What we were proposing was extremely simple. Let’s grow food to feed people in the community, not to satisfy aid organisations’ criteria, not to service a market in some far-away country, and not to please the local Mayor in order to attract services, which have already been allocated funding by the National government in Manila anyway. Getting back to basics.
The Schools were all on board, the local community and CSO’s were all for it, why do we need the Mayor’s approval? Let’s just do it and show him that it works. So we did or at least we have started. We now have several schools letting us guide them to implement permaculture gardens within their grounds and incorporate it (permaculture design) into school curriculum. We have several landholders willing to let students, out-of-school youth and other community members participate in food production projects and we are in the process of setting up programs designed to bring permaculture teachers, students and practitioners from abroad and around other parts of the Philippines to interact with local farmers, landholders, schools and CSO’s to share knowledge around the idea of sustainable agriculture.