Organic Farming in the Philippines

By Aurelio A. Pena

MAGSAYSAY, Davao del Sur - Cover your nose when you come to one of the compost pits at the edge of the ricefield -- it could stink to high heavens.

"Better get used to it," says Martin Amarillo, 47, grinning as he shovels some decomposing rice stalks into the stinking pit under the early morning sun.

Earlier, he had dumped in a pailful of carabao dung, chicken dung and entrails from fish. He learned doing this technique from visiting agriculturists from the nearby town of Magsaysay teaching farmers like him make organic fertilizer in this little rice village called Bala.

Slowly, but surely, many farmers in the Davao region are going into organic farming -- planting vegetables like cucumber, pechay, ampalaya, okra, patola, eggplant, string beans, etc., using nothing else but pure organic fertilizer they produced all by themselves.

"Chemical fertilizers are too expensive for us these days, we can't afford them anymore," says Amarillo who has his own two-hectare ricefield as well as a half-hectare devoted only to planting vegetables which are grown for local supermarkets in Davao City, 70 kilometers north of this village.

"Most of our earnings before go to buying chemical fertilizers, leaving us with almost nothing. Now, with our own organic fertilizer, we're beginning to see some profits," Amarillo added.

Over at Sibulan village in the same province, about 50 kilometers south, lawyer Koronado Apuzen, 58, president of Organic Producers and Exporters Corp. (OPEC), is even doing it in a big way--all his banana growers are using only organic fertilizer produced right at the plantation in the Davao highlands.

They all grow "organic bananas" for the Japanese organic export market which buys them at a high premium price per carton box--the only Filipino banana export firm going organic in a big way.

"It's beginning to pay off...We started doing this four years ago, producing only organic vegetables and organic bananas for export, back when they laugh at you. Now, many foreign buyers are looking for it," says Apuzen, who also heads Farmcoop, the country's biggest group of banana growers' cooperatives.

Apuzen uses a mixture of chicken manure, banana peelings, charcoal and coir dust to produce organic fertilizers at all his 80-hectare OPEC farms run by Bagobo-Tagabawa tribesmen at the rugged Sibulan mountain ranges here.

To fight sigatoka and other banana diseases, Apuzen uses a natural concoction of herbs which his tribal farmers spray on each banana plant.

"We've stopped buying pesticides and chemicals a long time ago and our profit margins are getting better," Apuzen said.

Most Davao farmers however are still dependent on chemicals which are draining away all their income from farming. Even before they start harvesting, typical farmers here are already deep in debt from using chemicals to kill pests and weeds provided by local traders.

"Farmers always find themselves deep in debt everytime they start planting and harvesting -- it's a vicious cycle over here. All the earnings from their farms go to the pockets of traders," says Anita Morales, executive director of METSA Foundation, which promotes organic farming among local farmers here.

But METSA's efforts during the last 15 years have won over hundreds of farmers to organic farming in the villages of Marilog, Tugbok and Calinan in the city's outskirts.

"Things have changed, but farmers before were forced to look for cash to buy pesticides and fertilizers in every stage of planting just to make sure their rice or vegetables grow well -- and this pushed them deeper into debt," Morales said.

To boost this growing organic movement, some 600 organic farmers banded together recently during the 5th National Organic Agriculture Conference here and vowed to put up a fight against "monoculture" farming by multinational farms that use excessive amounts of synthetic chemicals.

"All these multinationals producing cavendish bananas, pineapple and palm oil are the number one threat to the growing organic industry in Mindanao, endangering our food security," says Tom Villarin, head of Go Organic Mindanao movement.

Worldwide demand for organic products grew from 20 billion US dollars in 2001 to 33 billion US dollars in 2005. Some 30.6 million hectares of land -- a measly 2 percent -- are now into organic farming worldwide. In the Philippines, organic farming has hardly touched the country's agriculture farming, as only 0.01 percent of farmlands can be classified as organic, according to the Department of Agriculture (DA).