Metro Manila is a vulnerable megalopolis. The Ondoy disaster in September of 2009 demonstrated its vulnerability to powerful weather disturbances. Its decrepit infrastructure both aggravated Ondoy's destructiveness and hampered subsequent relief effort in its wake. It is this same decrepit infrastructure that also adds unnecessary cost to the transport of food (as well as many other essential commodities) into the metropolis and its distribution to its residents. As such, Metro Manila is also vulnerable to supply failures. In the event of a prolonged interruption in the steady stream of food products hauled in from the hinterlands by trucks and jeepneys as well as by barges from the Port of Manila and other feeder seaports, the ensuing scenario is not likely to be pretty.
There is therefore much reason to applaud the work Ben Kritz is doing around Urban Micro-Farming -- something he not only writes about as he is an actual participant in one such initiative within his own community. Urban microfarming as Kritz describes it involves the setting up of small self-sustaining farming enterprises within urban communities. The main stakeholders of these small farming enterprises (both in terms of its investors and operators) are themselves locals in the community it serves and operates in.
One thing I see that makes this a very promising development is its strong what's-in-it-for-me proposition for those who invest time and money in the effort.
The project Kritz describes is already yielding clear returns to the people who have invested a small amount of money and time to the project. These returns are quite robust and come in the form of both savings for its participants and a surplus for the enterprise itself which is re-invested back into it:
The eight members give varying estimates of the benefit, from one-fourth to one-half of their basic food supply, which is defined in this case as the food which they would otherwise purchase from the local palengke. Most of the revenue from the surplus produced has been turned back into the operation, but all eight members have recovered their initial P2,000 investment and earned several hundred pesos’ profit – small change to be sure, but when the value of the food supply is taken into account, the net benefit has been from P8,500 to P14,500 per person.
Local growing and sourcing of food is a worthwhile initiative that should gain traction in the Philippines considering that transport and bulk handling infrastructure is poor and contributes to high cost of food. This is aggravated even more by the fractured land geography of the country. Metro Manila is also peppered all over by so much idle and derelict land. Much of it is fenced and infested by weeds. Surely much of this can be put to productive use. In the case of Ben's project, the micro-farm was developed on a 140 square-metre donated plot of land. Interestingly, during disasters, there is a lot of sloganeering about this supposedly Filipino virtue of bayanihan. Well, if we aspire to be a society that routinely exhibits this virtue in its true sense, initiatives like these are opportunities to step up to that goal.
It is also interesting to note that even in advanced societies, there is a growing movement that is calling for a return to a food supply chain that is based more on localised farming and food processing (as compared to, say, the large-scale industrialised food production in specialised regions in the U.S. which is made possible by its excellent transport and handling infrastructure). The current industrial food production of advanced countries is heavily fossil fuel fueled; that is, its large-scale farming uses petroleum-based mechanised methods and input materials such as synthetic fertilisers. Specialisation of entire regions for agriculture necessitate large amounts of transport and handling before the food these produce gets to our dinner tables.
The low cost that industrialised farming and food production enables is really just an illusion because our current financial and monetary systems do not adequately factor in the full cost of what fuels this industrial efficiency -- the petroleum which results in the environmental degradation and the wars we fight today. Both of these cost us. Unfortunately these costs are treated separately and are not factored into the costs of the "cheap" food the advanced world is enjoying.
Industrial food production also poses a security threat in terms of
(1) vulnerability to a collapse in the system (which becomes more real as supply chains become more globalised and inter-dependent); and,
(2) reduced genetic diversity of the food crop gene pool (due the large tracts of homogenous-crop industrial farms) -- which makes our food crop vulnerable to catastrophic blight/disease and pest attacks.
More localised farming may not yield the same kind of industrial cost efficiency but compensates for these with benefits whose intangibility are more a function of the flawed way (i.e. our current monetary system) we use to measure value in our economies. These benefits include a more robust crop gene pools (because of disjoint farms and better application of crop rotation methods) less transport and storage costs, and less waste due to spillage and degradation during storage and transport.
The underdevelopment of the Philippines in this regard is an opportunity in that it forces us to start from a baseline that the advanced West might actually have to move back to eventually given the realities of the environmental challenges we face. Of course there will always be a need for large-scale industrial farming and this is also a much needed area of development in Philippine agriculture given the enormous size of our population. Perhaps the value of urban micro-farming such as what Ben Kritz is involved in lies as much around the creation of communities with a clear stake in their surroundings in the cold and impersonal mega-concrete-jungle that is Metro Manila as it contributes additional income and an ethic of self-reliance in its participants.
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