AN OUTSTANDING feature of the ongoing 9th Negros Island Organic Farming Festival (NIOFF) is the kind of partnership being established.
The NIOFF is no longer a local event. Nor even a national event. It entered the radar screen of the United Nations. It has become a model where economies who want to shift toward a greener character will be measured in the years to come.
For one thing, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Mountain Partnership are active participants. The FAO headquarters based in Rome has instructed its Philippine office to prioritize the Negros event. It sent Dr. Eulito U. Bautista to set aside his other schedules so that the FAO and the MP will have a face in the five-day event.
To be sure, the MP has already four members in place during the island-wide festival. There’s the Province of Negros Occidental led by Gov. Alfredo G. Marañón Jr. and its focal person Rafael “Lito” Coscolluela.
Of course, I represented the Broad Initiatives for Negros Development (BIND), a member since the MP founding in 2003. Then there’s the Non-Timber Forest Product-Exchange Programme.
And there’s the United Nations. For the first time since the NIOFF became a yearly event, the agency has agreed to take part as early as July 2014.
This kind of cooperation is what the UN classify as “Type Two” outcomes which are “partnerships of the willing” among various countries and government and private and civil society stakeholders. Such partnerships were forged outside the formal negotiation process of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development.
An example is the Integrative Approach to Organic Agriculture: Social, Environmental, and Economic Challenges, Benefits, and Opportunities between the Ministry of Environment in the Dominican Republic and Physicians for Social Responsibility (ISSER).
The collaboration was designed to provide capacity building and technology transfer to decision-makers and other major groups in the Dominican Republic regarding the principals and practices of organic agriculture with a view to fostering long-term sustainable food production, health, rural development, and the conservation of natural resources. It involves, among things, the promotion of legal
frameworks and enforcement.
And now in the global history of sustainable development, we have the State-led NIOFF, led by its sub-national government, or what Filipinos know as provincial local government.
The message that FAO’s Dr. Bautista on the Green Economy and Sustainable Mountain Development is equally important as the mere fact of FAO’s presence during the first day. I was happy to note that the largely indigenous people who listened to the presentation were active listeners.
It shows that where before their awareness was limited to their communities. Now they have expanded their knowledge to that of climate change, the scourge that affects all of us.
Droughts, flash floods, mudslides, and even storm surges are becoming personal concerns. Organic agriculture is being situated not just in individual farms nor even in small communities, but in the national and international context. Climate change expert Dr. Esteban C. Godilano drove home this point.
Almost everyone listened in as Dr. Gordillano warned that Negros Occidental ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. That the bad news is that there is no safe place against multiple hazards, that the safest place against storm surges in Bacólod City can be found in its elevated places like Barangays Alangilan and Granada.
As for those in most other Bacólod communities, he warned that we can run but we cannot escape the fury of a Yolanda megastorm. Everyone looked at each other, like who will get a bullet from a game of Russian roulette.
***
(bqsanc@yahoo.com)