Resilient community gardens in Iloilo City, Philippines: growing food sovereignty back

By Liao Yi-chuan (Project Assistant Researcher, National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction)

Living in an environment frequently disturbed by disasters, combined with a lack of disaster response capacity, makes people vulnerable; climate change in turn raises disaster risk, exposing vulnerable communities to even more severe disaster impacts.

In the face of disaster risk and the threat of climate change, food security is a key to survival; having a stable and self-reliant food supply can reduce the impact on daily subsistence and local livelihoods, avoid problems of hunger and even famine caused by interruptions in food supply and distribution, and can also create micro-community economies, from growing to shared meals, so that community members support one another, thereby reducing the disruption disasters cause to livelihoods and economic activity, enabling affected communities to recover and Build Back Better.

Therefore, the APEC-Emergency Preparedness Capacity Building Center (EPCC) proposed the "Plant Back Better (PBB)" initiative for more disaster-resilient smallholder farmers, advocating community agricultural planting strategies with a resilience concept in order to build smallholder farmers' adaptive capacity in the face of disasters and climate threats. With the support of APEC and the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction cooperated with the Iloilo City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office, Known-You Seed Philippines, and the World Vegetable Center to turn the PBB initiative into real community action, jointly implementing a resilient planting demonstration project in Barangay Lanit, Iloilo City, Philippines, in 2019.

Barangay Lanit, Iloilo City, Philippines, and the resilient planting project

Iloilo City sits on an alluvial plain, faces the sea, and lies low in elevation, with a dense network of waterways and meandering river channels. Over the past two decades, with flood control works, waterfront landscape development, and rapid urbanization, the city government has successively relocated informal settlements scattered along the riverbanks and in the city center to peri-urban areas. Barangay Lanit, located at the northernmost end of Iloilo City and serving as a resettlement site, mainly houses those displaced by river channel improvement, dike construction, floodway excavation, riverside park trails, and commercial development of the old airport site, as well as victims of typhoons and fires (Figure 1).

Relocation to a new site keeps residents away from the risk of having their homes swept away by river water and also allows their housing to gradually upgrade from self-built bamboo houses and tin-roofed houses to concrete dwellings; however, rebuilding only housing without production facilities leaves livelihoods facing even more severe challenges.

Originally working mainly as casual laborers, construction workers, tricycle drivers, and street vendors, with most residents in low-income households, they were moved from gaps in the city to the edge of vast farmland (Figure 2). But farming was not a skill they were familiar with, and lacking capital and arable land, they could only plant on odd plots around the settlement or rent land during the rice fallow period to grow vegetables; even though agribusinesses had offered agricultural training courses, it was difficult to encourage residents to switch to farming, and in the end they still chose to travel long distances every day to the city to make a living, relying on social welfare resources and even street begging to get by.

As a one-year, small-scale demonstration project, how to effectively mobilize community participation in agricultural action and how to establish a planting strategy suited to local conditions and capable of sustainable self-operation became the foremost keys to advancing the project. Therefore, on the advice of local community groups, the project implementation team sought volunteers from different neighborhoods of Barangay Lanit, totaling twenty seed trainees who took part.

At the same time, in response to the local climate with distinct dry and wet seasons, the initial plan was for dry-season crop planting from April to June and wet-season crop planting from July to September, with planting items including market-oriented cash crops as well as home gardens mainly for personal use. The project implementation team provided the seeds, tools, materials, farmland, and various technical support needed during the workshops, and through low-cost, low-threshold agricultural knowledge sharing and hands-on practice, aimed to build community gardens that balance climate adaptation, economic income, and nutritional intake, and hoped that participating households could turn that year's harvest into their first pot of gold for running a farm, so that even as external assistance gradually withdrew, the community could continue to operate on its own.

The impact of extreme climate and farming at the mercy of the weather

Having moved to the urban fringe, residents escaped flash floods from the river and avoided the disaster of destroyed homes and lost lives, but the lack of complete infrastructure meant farming could only depend on the weather; extreme climate further intensified the effects of unfavorable farming conditions, and even with hard work in the fields, they could still face the miserable situation of losing the entire harvest. Neighboring Iloilo Province is a major agricultural center of the Philippines, yet Barangay Lanit is the only barangay in Iloilo City with designated agricultural land; although the city government provided the farmland free of charge for the project's use, the land had long been abandoned and overgrown with weeds, and the surrounding area lacked irrigation and drainage facilities, so the community could only dig wells for water or wait for rain to irrigate.

The community garden had originally been scheduled to plant drought-tolerant crops at the end of April, but because a long absence of rainfall turned into drought, the land cracked and could not be prepared, and domestic water use was given priority, planting ultimately had to be postponed. During the project period, the mayoralty also changed hands, and the municipal transition again extended the project. It was not until August that the project restarted and switched to planting moisture-tolerant crops, but because the farmland was low-lying, it became severely waterlogged during the rainy season; although pumps were later used to drain the water before transplanting, the young seedlings were then drowned by the heavy rain of an incoming typhoon, and the community garden became virtually a pond, with the participants' labor almost entirely washed away (Figure 3).

The uncertainty of farming income was a key reason that made it difficult for community residents to muster the courage to commit to farming. When land preparation and bed building were being prepared in early August, nearly half of the participating households stopped taking part out of worry that the PBB project could not make money; they believed that the longer they worked in the fields, the less time they had to earn money elsewhere. For these relocated households, growing vegetables could hardly create extra income, so it was better to return to the city to work for a daily wage, where if you worked, you had food to eat.

Agriculture can also be an opportunity for community development

The residents of Barangay Lanit include not only displaced households from various parts of Iloilo City, but also urban indigenous people who rebuilt their homes here - the Ati. The Ati are an indigenous people distributed across the central Philippines who were displaced by urban development and became an urban poor population lacking stable work and even relying on street begging to survive. An Ati pastor, through church fundraising, purchased land in Barangay Lanit and established a community belonging to the Ati themselves.

With the assistance of the city government and social welfare agencies, the formerly homeless people began to build their own houses, and children who had followed adults to make a living on the streets had the chance to go to school; more and more Ati came to the community, increasing from 12 households at the start to 24 households. However, even with a home of their own, life remained difficult. Seen by society as beggars, unclean people, non-producers, and troublemakers, these various stigmas caused the Ati to be ostracized by neighbors and excluded by society, making it hard for them to find stable work. Thus, participating in the PBB project became an opportunity for the Ati to improve their livelihoods.

To allocate participation opportunities fairly among the settlements, the project stipulated that each settlement could send only five representatives to take part in the workshops, and the Ati were no exception. But the Ati did not stop at participating in the training; they brought what they learned in the workshops back to their community, actively shared it with fellow community members, and spontaneously tried it out on community land, adjusting their original farming methods.

As the drought lifted, in May 2019 the community members began preparing the land, turning odd plots around their homes, such as vacant land beside roads and ponds, into row after row of raised beds. They also set up barriers at the field edges and built up the beds to cope with the threat of flooding during the rainy season. In June they sowed seeds and raised seedlings, proactively contacted Known-You Seed for technical assistance, and planted okra, snap beans, cassava, loofah, and papaya, among others, and applied the home garden knowledge taught by the World Vegetable Center, using local native varieties of corn as a windbreak and pest barrier hedge to protect the low-growing crops in the inner ring (Figure 4).

With harvests coming in during July and August, the new vegetable garden that the Ati had figured out step by step produced an unprecedented yield, not only enough to feed the community's children but also with a surplus to sell outside. Neighbors who had once mocked the indigenous people for muddling along instead began to regard the Ati with new respect, buying vegetables from them and asking them for advice on how to grow them. The abundant harvest gave the Ati fresh fruits and vegetables and farming income, and also gave them a sense of achievement in farming and strengthened their self-identity and community identity.