WE cannot deny that our planet is suffering from severe and complex problems emanating from anarchic production and waste from advanced industrial countries. Technologically engineered products like plastics, robots and chemical-based agricultural crops like genetically modified organisms (GMOs), contaminate our air, water and land. It affects the indigenous, normal and regular flow of our ecosystem hence climate change.
Another concern is the continuous modification on seeds. Pioneered by the world’s biggest companies in agro-technology like Syngenta, Monsanto, Rockefeller Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and IRRI, they spend billions of dollars for modification projects. the act is masked in the humanitarian morality of feeding the world. They were able to deceive the public through partnership with the government.
Despite the billions of pesos the government spent to alleviate poverty and prevent the destruction of ecosystems, it seems that all measures are not enough. Corruption has become normal in Philippine politics at the expense of man and the environment’s health.
We must learn from the experience of other countries like Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Indonesia. When the International Conference on Golden Rice was held in Manila last April 1-6, they shared the outcome of the bio-fortification process.
Under a tarrification environment, government support to local agriculture and farmers could be further be limited as the agreement calls for total state non-intervention. We think that the total liberalization of agriculture would only push the country’s population into hunger and food insecurity.
The government should heed the demand of Filipino farmers to implement a nationalist and mass-oriented socio-political reform and implement free land distribution by passing the Genuine Agrarian Reform bill. For through this law, our farmers are assured of safe and sustainable right not only to food but also for a better type of living.
We call on all concerned individuals including civil society organizations to be responsible enough and avoid another public and environment disaster as a result of the golden rice project. Instead of promoting genetically modified organisms owned by giant trans-national companies, the Philippine government should focus its resources on supporting organic agriculture and developing our farmers’ skills. It should pass laws that can protect the land, people and environment against technology malpractice.
Quoting a woman farmer leader from Quezon City is just and timely: “land, farmers and food systems must be liberated from the control of corporate greed, GMOs and toxic products to combat malnutrition, hunger and poverty. Farmers’ right to land, seed and practices of sustainable and ecological agriculture must be supported to ensure safe, nutritious food and a thriving healthy ecology for all.”--Philippine Network of Food Security Programmes, Inc (PNFSP)