AS A freelance consultant in local governance and organizational development over the last 10 years I must have already engaged with over 200 cities and municipalities in the Philippines providing capacity development training that were tailor-fitted to their needs.
One of my methods in teaching local government units (LGUs) is to share best practices of some local government leaders who introduced innovations that made a great impact in their locality. Allow me then to share one of the success stories in local governance that I personally witnessed.
I had a short consultancy stint with Himamaylan City during the pandemic and while I was engaging with the said LGU I saw one best practice that the local mayor there successfully put in place –- The Himamaylan Food Basket. I would say it was the first ever 100% LGU-funded and run food basket in the Philippines and is worth replicating in all LGUs even after the pandemic.
What started as just an auxiliary feeding program for Day Care pupils developed into a comprehensive food sufficiency program for the whole city as a response to hunger felt at the height of the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ).
It started when Mayor Raymund Tongson built a community kitchen. But after realizing that the said kitchen was only enough to feed the frontliners but not large enough to feed the poorest of the poor, he conceptualized the Himamaylan Food Basket to fill in the huge gap of food insufficiency.
With the funding from both the City Agriculture’s Office and the City Mayor’s Office, the Himamaylan Food Basket was made into three strands; the Demo Farm, the Agro-food Production Hub, and the Barangay-based Gardening Program.
The 1.4 hectare Demo Farm was able to sustain the weekly need of the Community Kitchen in providing food for all frontliners including indigent PWDs, and marginalized senior citizens.
The 17-hectare Tree Park run by the city which was idle for the longest time was converted into an agro-food production hub and was cultivated to augment food insufficiency. True to its intended purpose, the Tree Park became the main food supplier of the city-run Community Kitchen as well as for LGU-initiated relief operations that provided food to the poorest of the poor.
A barangay-based community garden program was also launched. It was a program where idle lands in the barangays were cultivated. The City Agriculture provided for the seeds and technical services to whoever wanted to cultivate their own idle lands. All harvested products went to those who till the land.
More than the quick fill on the stomach and food rations at home, the Himamaylan Food Basket has brought out a new energized community. It ignited a morale boost for the whole city that was once beset by backwardness and passivity.
On the first two years of launching the program, Himamaylan Food Basket was successful in providing supplementary rations twice a week to over 15,000 indigents especially at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Aside from the marginalized sectors, the beneficiaries of the supplementary rations from the Himamaylan Food Basket included national agencies such as the Philippine National Police, the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology and other frontline agencies locating in the city. The strong support of the LGU to these frontline service providers has created a strong collective spirit of cooperation in working together for the Himamaylanons and has established a renewed confidence to the local government.
Himamaylan Food Basket has made the city resilient in the adverse effect of the pandemic and has ignited confidence among the public in rising above the situation and forging a more vibrant city for a better Himamaylan.
Indeed, an ounce of creativity and innovation can make a great impact. I could only hope that our newly elected officials in the different LGUs all over the Philippines can see that if they know how to use the powers vested in them by the people just like how Mayor Raymund Tongson did in Himamaylan, then they too can alter the course of history in their localities and change the lives of their constituents for the better.