Monday, October 02, 2006 T'bolis of Ned, nomads no more
LAKE SEBU, South Cotabato -- Populated mostly by T'boli tribesmen, Sitio Datal Bonlangon at Barangay Ned has an intimidating coldness that even foreigners already used to winter have a hard time fending off the shivers.
Early afternoons and the fogs mightily invade the horizon but the harsh weather in the village usually rear its head prior to sunrise.
The cool climate, however, is just a chilling backdrop to the poverty that for ages hounded the villagers, who, laudably, seemed to have been immune to scarcity, where even the water they drink is being gathered through split-bamboos connected to a mountain rock spurting the liquid.
For decades, the T'bolis in this village accessible by two hours of rocky, muddy treacherous terrain have been able to subsist mainly on backward agricultural practices.
Clearing one patch of land to plant and then to harvest, they would move to another part of the mountain to cultivate the area in what is known as "shifting agriculture."
This phenomenon is part of the culture of the T'bolis, they being a nomadic people, in the belief that the method would restore the fertility of the soil lost to a single cropping season.
However, their practice, in the last three years is being improved without significantly altering their culture, by way of the "Sloping Agricultural Land Technology" or Salt method.
"We want them to become a progressive community through an agricultural practice that would not incur them too much expenses," said Jerry Grapilo, a volunteer agricultural technology for the Oblates of Notre Dame-run Hessed Foundation.
"A community that can sustain themselves until the end of time," added Grapilo, himself a T'boli who volunteered to the project as gratitude to the foundation for sending him through college.
He earned last year a diploma in Bachelor in Agricultural Technology.
Through the scholarship, Mario Malit, a B'laan from Polomolok, South Cotabato, also earned the same degree last year. He also volunteered for the foundation's agricultural project in this remote village.
"Our thrust here is to propagate organic farming, which has been the method my T'boli brothers and sisters have been using for years," Malit said.
Both Grapilo and Malit came from poor parents that cannot see their children through college had there been no intervention from benefactors.
"It's payback time to our benefactors that's why we are here. We have introduced others crops like durian, bananas, and vegetables to widen the residents' agricultural productivity," Malit said.
The sustainable agriculture program by the religious foundation came after about three years of involving the natives in adult literacy program.
These programs, according to Sr. Susan Bolanio--executive director of Hessed, were meant to improve the lot of the natives who have been given scant government attention.
"Our aim is to empower communities, help them become self-reliant whatever their religions are. Hopefully with our intervention, they would no longer starve," she said.
Efforts are apparently paying off now. The T'bolis have established their community and are no longer moving from one place to another.
From their community, sceneries of neatly cultivated corn and rice fields dot the nearby hills. In their backyards, various vegetables are up for the picking, with onion leaves as fat as a finger. String beans, taro and cassava also looking healthy.
Aside from planting materials, the religious foundation has also distributed several pigs and ducks to the residents who will later share the offspring with their neighbors until every household will have one.
The community has around 70 families or more than 300 residents mostly belonging to the T'boli tribe. The others are Ubo, Manobo, B'laan and Kaulo tribes.
Late this October, the residents are scheduled to hold their first "Harvest Festival," where they would share the bounties of the earth.
"In the near future, we're hoping these residents would have more than what they need so they could sell the excess to the market. That's the ultimate goal of the project," Grapilo said.
Victor Danyan, the village leader, said the literacy and sustainable agriculture projects brought by the foundation has changed their lives.
"Several adult natives who have not been to grade one have learned to read and write. On agriculture, we learned new techniques that significantly increase the production," he said.
A demonstration farm is lying not far away from the heart of the community, where corn, cassava, beans, nuts and other crops are grown for distribution to nearby villages.
But close to it is a coffee plantation that Danyan has no kind words for.
"The coffee plantation is threatening us. We don't want that company and we are ready to die for our ancestral land if push comes to shove," he said.
For a time now, the natives are getting legal help from the Legal Resources Center-Kasama sa Kalikasan Friends of the Earth Philippines in their uphill fight against the company.
According to a case brief from the center, the Department of Environment Natural Resources issued in 1991 an Industrial Tree Plantation License Agreement (ITPLA) 238 to Silvicultural Industries Incorporated (SII) but a year later it was converted into Industrial Forest Plantation Management Agreement (IFMA).
The agreement, which will expire in December 2016, covers 11,862 hectares. The IFMA was introduced by the DENR in 1991 as a key component of its Industrial Forest Plantation (IFP) scheme with the issuance of DENR Administrative Order 42.
The IFMA was designed as an integrative approach to forestry, replacing the controversial and forest-extractive Timber License Agreement (TLA) system.
But IFMA is not favored by the lumads living around the plantation, as it has driven them away from their ancestral lands and hampered them from cultivating their lands, the case brief said.
In 2004, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples reported that: "In 1991 the company representatives informed them that their land was part of a logging concession area but that this would be a positive development because of the building of new roads to transport their produce. Company representatives made no reference to the planting of coffee, much less the conversion of the area into a large coffee plantation."
Within seven months, trees were felled until the area was completely logged over, it added. "Soon after, bulldozers and other heavy machinery arrived and cleared the entire area of bananas, fruit trees, native coffee and other locally grown plants including rattan to make way for a coffee plantation. Only when the mechanized and massive clearing was in full swing did the people realize that their land had been taken away from them," the report said.
The report added: "Thereafter, they were prevented from tilling their farms and those who attempted to do so were harassed by company guards armed with carbines, armalites and rifles. Those who tried to work on the company's clearings were fired at. Before long, the cleared areas were planted to arabica and robusta coffee."
The company could not be reached for its comment on the United Nations report but the firm has been consistently maintaining it is operating legally on allegations it is encroaching on the lands of the natives.
Currently, the community, with the legal help of its partners, is still preparing for the application of Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT).
The villagers believe that if they can secure CADT, they can expand and cultivate their farmlands.
"We can plant more crops if we can finally secure our own land," they said. Of the 11,862 hectares under the IFMA, the T'boli villagers claim at least 6,000 hectares as their ancestral domain.
In 1992, the Department of Agrarian Reform issued Certificate of Land Ownership Award (CLOA) to 30 families in the village.
The sitio is part of the 21,700-hectare resettlement area declared under Presidential Proclamation 550 in 1969.
For now, the residents content themselves with farming in the not more than 50 hectares of land under the sustainable agriculture program of the religious foundation.
They conceded the fight will be arduous, just like the way to reach this cold place at the midst of a mountain.
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