The seed, the chain, is also a spiral–Agroecology and forest conservation in rural Philippines

November 13, 2024

Language(s)

Written by: Javie Barcinal (2024 Restoration Stewards)
and Tonio Flores II (Agroecology Lead)
October 2024, Antique, Philippines

Learning about rural social dynamics and grassroots strategies can guide us in food systems transformation and biodiversity conservation. These are the seeds of change that can spiral into systemic changes through agroecology, bioregionalism, and land-based knowledge.

I’m Javie Barcinal, the 2024 Forest Restoration Steward of the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF). Together with Agroecology Lead Tonio Flores, coordinator Sharmaine Blas, and the locals of Barangay Alojipan in our hometown in the Philippines, we are working to protect the critically endangered Rufous-headed Hornbill, or ‘Dulungan,’ through forest restoration and the development of regenerative, agroecology-based food systems. Our efforts focus on empowering grassroots leaders, revitalizing traditional knowledge and integrating it into our work, advancing community-led conservation that respects the land, its beings, and the local livelihood of its people.

Sakada and the industrial food chain

Community members engage in ‘Dagyaw,’ the Filipino tradition of bayanihan, as they work together to establish plots at our agroecology site. Photo credit: Tonio Flores

The industrial food chain is breaking. The ‘rural margins’, the ‘fray’, and ‘last mile communities’ are witnessing it rust and rip apart. Why are rural people—those who live close to the land and carry its knowledge—the most hungry, exploited, and financially burdened? Here, we point out all that is wrong with extractive food systems because we know the Earth is abundant and generous.

Auntie Araceli, one of the active mothers and a core member in our restoration work, was telling us that their quality of life drastically improved when they were able to use public land to grow food. They would plant food crops, cassava, corn, beans and peanuts, that they would bring down the winding mountain road to the town market.

The erosion of rural knowledge and traditional practices reflects the steady march of neoliberalism and globalized production, which prioritize profit over people and environment. In her book Remaindered Life, Filipino feminist scholar N.X.M. Tadiar explores how certain groups—such as rural workers, disabled individuals, women, queer communities, and even more-than-human entities like nature—are often treated as “leftover” or “remaindered” by the dominant economic and social systems. These groups may seem expendable or off-standard to the present order, which values only those who fit neatly into profit-driven, extractive structures. However, Tadiar argues that these “remaindered” identities embody ways of being and knowledge that actively resist extraction and exploitation. Rather than viewing them as disposable, she suggests that we recognize the inherent power in these “othered” identities, whose resilience and unique perspectives hold valuable insights and solutions for a more sustainable and equitable society. Through her research, Tadiar encourages readers to rethink the value systems shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, and to see the diversity of marginalized lives as essential for societal survival.

Today, 44 sakadas, bachelors and fathers, leave for indentured labor as sugarcane plantation workers in massive haciendas on the neighboring island of Negros. The term “sakada” refers to Filipino migrant workers who leave their homes to work on sugar plantations in the Visayas and Mindanao regions during the Spanish colonial period and the American era.

Negros, known as the “Sugar Bowl of the Philippines,” was a major destination for these workers. Around a hundred men from the community left this month to be sakadas. With all their belongings bundled up in backpacks, they leave one by one hunched up on motorcycles down the steep road from the upland barangay towards the town. There, they will be picked up by their recruiters, aboard a boat to the neighboring island of Negros.

For six to seven months, they labor without rest days, slicing down sugarcane stalks, and carrying them as bundles loaded up onto trucks to be sent for juicing. Sakadas endure harsh working conditions, long hours, and low wages on the plantations. In those six months, they earn 30,000 Philippine Pesos (approximately 525 USD), with 20,000 Pesos (350 USD) paid in advance, a few weeks before they leave. This cash advance is the lure of the scheme, with the rest of their salary paid at the end of their contract. Most of them will return home with no money left or, worse, with debt.

It’s been like this for decades, the haciendas, plantations that were founded by feudal lords during Spanish colonization, produced commodity crops such as cotton, tobacco, and sugar to satisfy the demands of Europe and North America. These haciendas still exist today, seemingly under different local management, but still with harsh working conditions and unfair wages. These extractive industries rely on cheap menial labor to satisfy an insatiable globalized economy.

The plantation is just one of many examples that reveal the extractivist logic embedded in our industries and knowledge systems. Extractivism corrodes the deep relationships between people and land. It reduces culture and nature as products for consumption.

There is an undeniable dissatisfaction among rural communities over decades of having to live off the very few opportunities offered to them. Of course, grassroots folks will take every chance to make money just to survive. This includes poaching wildlife, cutting down trees for timber, and working in industrial plantations. These extractive activities are often commissioned by landlords and foreign businessmen. Through the eyes of institutions, the rural working class is shamed for their survival tactics and labeled lazy and unreasonable. All of this without taking a long, compassionate look at the underlying systemic inequalities and human needs driving their actions.

These presumptions overshadow the fact that grassroots communities have always held the knowledge that is good for them, and good for our commons. They offer ways of living with and in nature that can unlock most of our challenges in forest management and restoration. Local communities know the names and uses of forest species, they intuitively know how to do assisted natural regeneration, and they make very hearty meals from foraged ingredients. Our restoration and protection efforts become more effective and enduring when grassroots communities are trusted with their knowledge and are enabled to lead forest conservation initiatives.

Spiraling and taking back power

All hands in the soil, we’re learning about soil diversity here, and planting some seeds while we’re at it. Photo credit: Tonio Flores

Before beginning our work, we were intentional with how we can make sense of the systemic issues in conservation and restoration work in the Philippines, such as recognizing that upland communities are often blamed for forest and biodiversity loss. The spiral model of popular education (see Fig. 1) draws from the knowledge and lived experiences of the learners. Participants are seen as and treated as agents who can recreate their world and make change. This approach acknowledges and attempts to equalize power dynamics within our group.

Fig 1: Spiral Model of Popular Education. From: Rural Support Partners

As facilitators, we engage in an ongoing reflection in our role and influence in the learning and planning. Our community partners learn and act in their own context. We create the whole curriculum for food, farming, and conservation together. We slowly unravel our experiences of financial precarity and landlessness as symptoms of deep systemic rifts and unjust policies that harm rural people. We make moments for reflection and action, by planting food crops, going on foraging walks, cooking, and eating together.

Preparing the soil to plant the seeds in our nursery. Photo credit: Tonio Flores

Where we are, land-based knowledge is abundant, we use this for planning for people-led land management. As students of the land, we collectively become active and creative co-investigators and co-learners. In attempting to remake local food systems and conservation paradigms in Northern Antique, community partners are invited to define their own agendas. This process requires trust, patience, and deep study.

Agroecology and restoration

Our ever evolving agroecology learning site. Photo credit: Tonio Flores

All these difficulties—of financial precarity, a struggling stakeholdership within the Central Panay Mountains Key Biodiversity Area (KBA), food insecurity, and forest cover loss—find its practical repose in agroecology. Agroecology is a living practice that folks already know how to do and is embedded in our local knowledge systems. If we aim to restore landscapes, we must respond to urgent needs and address the root causes of the economic and systemic marginalization of rural communities.

Throughout our conversations and workshops with our partners, they articulate that establishing ways to make a living within the land, work that is not underpaid or extractive, has always been the missing element in institutional conservation projects. Where they were just contracted to plant tree seedlings for a meager price and left to fend off for themselves. We insist that farming, foraging, craft making, and forest stewardship can be stable well paying jobs that can sustain people and protect the KBA.

We find that using food and farming in our organizing brings people, land, and biodiversity together seamlessly. For us, agroecology is the launchpad for forest and biodiversity conservation. In contrast to industrial agriculture which relies heavily on external inputs like chemical fertilizers and pesticides, agroecology works with nature’s processes. We farm using techniques that enhance soil health and encourage biodiversity to thrive. We abandon the use of toxic pesticides and fertilizers made from petrochemicals tied to larger extractive industries.

Agroecology as lived experience

Auntie Araceli stewards a plot of public land where she grows rice, fruit trees, and root crops. Photo credit: Tonio Flores

In the past weeks, we were able to hold two workshops on agroecology, covering the essential concepts of what makes agroecology work for people and nature. To highlight that the knowledge of agroecology is something that people already practice, most of the discussions are intended for locals to share about their practices such as cover cropping with legumes such as mung beans, long beans and peanuts to restore soil health. Composting readily available materials like fallen leaves and cow and carabao manure is another way locals in Northern Antique already help return essential nutrients to the soil.

Auntie Araceli sharing about their composting process using kitchen waste, animal manure, banana stalks, and leaves from leguminous trees. Photo credit: Mairu Infantado

All of these techniques are already being practiced, but it is a constant re-negotiation to use conventional farming techniques like fertilizers and pesticides to get by. However, agroecological knowledge is intact and just needs to be supported, and given time to grow.

Noticing agrobiodiversity

Photo credit: Tonio Flores

We mapped out edible forest and agroforestry species within the Key Biodiversity Area, creating a growing library of species: singkwa (a wild variety of sponge gourd), pako-pako (edible ferns), alupidan (Tetrastigma sp., sour shoots from a vine used in soups), labnuk (Olax imbricata, shoots from a shrub used as a vegetable), to name a few. This is proof of how readily abundant and generous the forest is. It is proof that we do not have to yearn for hybrid and imported vegetable varieties that do not fit our palate and context. We’ve been cooking together in workshops like this, most of the time ending the sessions with a big meal with ingredients foraged from the area.

Chicken soup being cooked over woodfire, tinolang manok. Later Nang Tata adds papaya, lemongrass, and malunggay leaves provided by neighbors. Photo credit: Tonio Flores

A thriving test crop of soybean seeds from our farmer friends. Photo credit: Tonio Flores

Over the last few months, we were able to plant different varieties of vegetables that we like, with some vegetables sowed from seeds shared by farmer friends from other islands. Beans go together with corn, okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) together with saluyot (Corchorus olitorius) and soybeans. We’ve been noticing more butterflies and bees visiting the garden. Sometimes a praying mantis sits on one of the okra leaves. The community learning site is shaping up. We now have a shared nursery for vegetable and tree seedlings, and lots of raised beds to plant out different food crops, and test out agroecology techniques together.

Our shared nursery for food crops and tree seedlings is almost ready! Photo credit: Tonio Flores

Many budding community leaders have also taken on roles such as leading the gardening activities, cooking, and ideating for events. The core group for this learning site has become closer over the last few months. We have been spending longer lingering moments under the shade of the Ficus trees by the river beds, under the warm light filtering through the leaves.

These workshops show how non-profits and movements should trust the rural working class in what they know. There is a wide opportunity to organize local communities and surface their knowledge to contribute to actionable strategies for National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), Conference of the Parties (COPs) and international agreements.

Grassroots communities are experts in their context. Our processes, as partners and facilitators, should engage and uphold all of their situated knowledge. Through this, we resist and unlearn power dynamics imposed by institutions espousing imperialist science and neoliberal values.

There is still a long way to go, nonprofit initiatives should not take all the responsibility in creating better economic conditions for rural communities. Much of this work should be collaborative and intersectoral. As much as it is pioneered by civil society organizations and grassroots initiatives, continuing it should be a concerted effort between public and private institutions with the leadership of grassroots agents.

The seed, the chain, is also a spiral. The rusty industrial food chain is breaking. It is unmaking itself in myriad ways, with all of its extractive logic composting and spiraling back for working-class well-being and the restoration of our commons. Rural people are taking back their power and rearranging the industrial food chain into an entangled and living web of food, people, and land.