THE fast spread of junk and other toxic food nowadays and their deadly impact on our health, especially on our children, have prompted a group of mothers in Negros to bond together for a common advocacy as their way of contributing to restoring healthy life among families.
Calling themselves as Moms Across Philippines or simply Moms, the group described themselves as a community-based social movement of mothers and women advocating food security and healthy and safe food as the foundation for a healthy and sustainable family life.
The group patterned itself from Moms Across America, a known strong women’s advocacy and social enterprise group across the United States, exposing junk food, GMO food and seeds; control of food system by agro-chemical companies; and lobbying for legislation that uphold and defend healthy and GMO-free food.
Local Moms led by founding president Ruby Cantero said that families especially the mothers are a good avenue to start the advocacy campaign. Mothers know best what’s good for her family, especially children.
Many mothers have no time to prepare safe and healthy food for their children, so oftentimes they have to content themselves with ready to eat food for their meal and snacks, most of whom from big malls and local retailers reported to be a distributor of GMO food.
In schools, their children are also exposed to a lot of food without traceability what materials they used and how they are prepared.
For Moms, educating fellow moms what food are safe and healthy is important for building a healthy family life.
For almost a year now, the Moms has been going around barangays in Bacolod and Negros Island to conduct information and education campaign to raise awareness on the need to organize mothers and families to fight for food security, healthy, and safe food.
But more than advocating for safe and healthy food, the Moms have been trying also to position themselves as community-based social entrepreneurs reprocessors of alternative meals and snacks. They want to produce and sell by themselves, the healthy and safe food they advocate.
This concept is important in sustaining their advocacy, and vice versa, providing a good market for their healthy food products.
Three Moms chapters in Bacolod are already preparing to produce alternative beverages like turmeric-ginger tea, lemongrass juices, ready-to-cook fishball packs with healthy ingredients, among others.
Altertrade Philippines Inc. (ATPI), a fair trade food company that produces organic muscovado and grow-sell organic green banana (balangon), and other fair trade products for domestic and international fair trade markets, which have also been assisting the development of Moms, said they have also plan with Moms to produce a variety of snack foods, mostly vegetable based.
Gilda Caduya, president of ATPI said that Moms will not only play important role in their fair trade work, but strengthen and spread as well their community-based food processors, expand their food products, and eventually develop to a higher level their envisioned producer-consumers movement for food security and safety.
Cantero, for her part, expressed hope that they can link with more social enterprise foundations and benevolent institutions who could help them increase their capitalization for food production, food processing equipment and skills development trainings of their members, and thereby increasing their strength for advocacy of healthy and safe food.
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