AVANT GARDENER

Once in a while, there will be a story about farmers dumping their produce on the side of the road, followed by well-meaning but ultimately ignorant and self-righteous consumers talking about how unresourceful these farmers are when they could be making pomodoro (not even kamatis or tomato, just to show how cultured they are) sauce out of it. 

This was one of the things addressed in my conversation with Jomar Fleras, the executive director of Rise Against Hunger Philippines (RAHP), a non-profit food bank I had featured in Agriculture magazine back when I was editor-in-chief.

“We did a survey just this year; it was done by [a highly respected third party consultancy firm], and that survey showed that 30 percent of all the vegetables brought to the trading post, or bagsakan, are actually rejected, and the farmers are throwing them along the road. They cannot dispose of them there since they have to pay a disposal fee, which is going to cost them. The farmers are suffering,” he said. “It is very ironic because the producers of food are the ones who are very hungry.”

We were talking about food waste and how it can be circumvented to feed hungry Filipinos, particularly children, and how addressing child hunger can lead to better citizenry. “Globally, food loss is about 30 percent, which is enough to feed all the hungry people. When it comes to policy-making, the government should already have enacted a Food Act bill, which states that all companies should not dispose of their valuable food and donate it to food banks for distribution to people who are hungry,” he said. “This is a bill that does not need a budget because you are looking at what is already available and distributing it. Why would you feed landfills when you can feed people? And when you feed landfills, you contribute 10 percent to greenhouse gas emission.”

RAHP is trying to address this. It set up a food bank in the Nueva Vizcaya Agriculture Terminal (NVAT) where vendors can trade their excess vegetables for items that have been donated to RAHP like “canned goods, toothbrushes and toothpaste, water, and other things” instead of throwing them away. The vegetables, which are still perfectly edible, “will be given to schools in Nueva Vizcaya” where RAHP has programs that feed “about 25,000 people, both students and families.”

Fleras also talked about using unused space to plant vegetables, another project RAHP is working on. “There is a lot of new real estate in business districts or business areas. The tops of their buildings can be used to plant vegetables using hydroponic systems. We have… partnered with [a company]  to convert building rooftops into hydroponic farms. We will be planting high-yielding vegetables for salad and selling them to restaurants. We have a lot of buyers already. The proceeds from that will go to Rise Against Hunger, and we will use them to feed children,” he said.

Some people will ask, “why not just use hydroponics to plant vegetables to feed to the children instead of going through the circuitous route of selling them? (because we all know that this is something people will ask)” to which Fleras has a good answer that isn’t apparent to people who aren’t immersed in the fields of agriculture and social work: “It is very difficult to grow pinakbet vegetables through hydroponic farming, so we will plant high yield vegetables to make it profitable. We cannot use salad vegetables like lettuce to feed the children because they will not eat them.”

Part of a well-run feeding program isn’t just making sure that the recipients have enough nutrients. It also takes into account taste and culture, among many other factors. Are these dishes delicious and are they culturally appropriate? 

There’s also the fact that it takes less resources to transport goods to far places, such as from a building rooftop in Manila to a school in Nueva Vizcaya (not to mention ridiculous in this specific scenario), so selling vegetables to nearby buyers and using the profits to feed children makes a lot of sense. “We [will] sell [the harvested vegetables] to buyers in the area, and at the same time, we are cutting down on our carbon footprint. In the business area, there are a lot of restaurants; you just need to go down in the building and sell it to the restaurants. Lesser carbon footprint, lesser environmental impact, and the revenue we get will help us buy food for the kids,” Fleras said. 

A lot of people like to comment on Facebook about systems they know nothing about. Instead of lecturing farmers about not throwing away tomatoes, these commenters should put their money where their mouths are and move away from their keyboards and into actually supporting our farmers through buying local, pressuring government officials for a better food system, or supporting organizations like RAHP that includes agriculture in their overall plan for a food secure future.