This photo, taken on Oct. 25, 2016, shows a bit of organic farming n San Pablo City, Laguna. (INQUIRER FILE PHOTO)
KAUSWAGAN, Lanao del Norte, Philippines — Advocates are calling on the government to take further steps to cultivate a good atmosphere for promoting organic agriculture in the country.
At the conclusion of the weeklong 6th Organic Asia Congress here on Friday, the more than 1,200 participants — including 245 foreigners — recognized the importance of favorable government policy to soften the ground and make organic agriculture take root throughout farming localities.
For the Philippines, the participants said that having a presidential adviser on organic agriculture would be a big boost in the campaign to transform the current farming practice in the country toward a sustainable agriculture that shuns the use of toxic chemicals in the production of crops.
Kauswagan Mayor Rommel Arnado vowed to take up the challenge of lobbying for the proposal.
Arnado said they were also working on including an organic agriculture program as among the criteria in evaluating the eligibility of local governments for a Seal of Good Local Governance (SGLG) award, which the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) confers every year.
An SGLG award earns for a local government a grant from the national government for development projects.
Small segment
Of the country’s 1,489 municipalities, only 251 have organic agriculture programs even as Republic Act No. 10098, or the Organic Agriculture Act of 2010, mandates the promotion of this farming mode, noted Arnado, who is president of the country’s League of Organic Agriculture Municipalities, Cities and Provinces, and sits in the National Organic Agriculture Board, an attached agency of the Department of Agriculture (DA).
As of December 2016, the DA said that a total of 349,041 hectares of agricultural land was converted to organic farmland, representing 4.86 percent of the country’s total agricultural land.
The total volume of organic production was 525,863 metric tons, reaching 106 market destinations (86 domestic and 20 export markets), benefiting some 116,558 farmer-beneficiaries, the DA further said.
A 2017 study done by the Research Institute for Organic Agriculture and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movement cited “the very significant and very encouraging growth of organic agriculture” in the country in 2015.