Eugenio Lemos (Photo from the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation)
MANILA, Philippines — One of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award recipients, Eugenio Lemos, endured years of extreme hunger in the mountains as a child, having fled the conflict areas of Timor-Leste during the civil war and Indonesian invasion in the mid-1970s.
To survive, his family was forced to scrounge for food in the forest, but his father and youngest sister starved to death. After emerging from hiding, his brother couldn’t adapt to the diet that was available and also died.
The harrowing experience sowed the seeds of a life dedicated to ensuring that the future generations of his country, which became an independent, sovereign state only in 2002, would not suffer the same hardships.
“My experience during the civil war is no good experience at all. I hope it’s not going to repeat again in any country because I witnessed myself how people were dying of hunger, they lost their family and the kids were malnourished,” Lemos said at a press conference on Sept. 4.
Now also a popular musician in his home country, Lemos has spent years promoting community-based organic farming as a simple yet transformative solution for food scarcity.
Low-level, high-impact
In 1999, Lemos learned from an Australian practitioner the concept of permaculture, an autonomous framework for managing the development of agricultural ecosystems.
Recognizing its potential, he established the educational program Permatil with the goal of instructing young adults in organic farming.
“It [set out] to strengthen the knowledge of the people and make them more resilient rather than become marginalized by modern technology,” he said, recalling his early efforts.
Almost single-handedly, he launched his mission with the setup of about a thousand water collection ponds and 300 springs—projects that would soon benefit around 400,000 of his countrymen.
Underlining these initiatives was his belief that the most high-impact actions were still those springing from the grassroots or the community itself, not from centralized, top-to-bottom directives.
And so one of his projects focuses on individual Timorese families, encouraging them to tend a vegetable garden in their own home, no matter how small.
Passive to active learning
He also worked to persuade Timorese youths to pursue agriculture as a course and main source of livelihood or enterprise, calling for the integration of permaculture into the national curriculum.
“Shifting passive learning in the classroom to active learning outside the school [is like giving] students a live-for-living book rather than a written book,” said Lemos, 51. The latter, he said, can be in different languages and be applicable to different places or cultures.
As founder of the group Sustainable Agriculture Network and the Organic Agriculture Movement, he also campaigned for the preservation of indigenous traditions while warning against overdependence on modern technology in agriculture.
“For even when we introduced technology and machinery, we never really solved food insecurity in the world and now we are affected by climate change,” he said.
Traditional knowledge, Lemos said, can continue to empower people and make them more resilient amid the environmental crisis.
Songs, road trips
Not surprisingly, these advocacies are woven into his creative life as a singer-songwriter. His award-winning songs conveying these themes in the native tongue Tetum are now sung by children in classrooms.
One branch of his projects is indeed directed at campuses, where young students are introduced not only to basic cultivation but also composting, seed selection, and natural pest control. These initiatives have so far covered over 250 public schools across Timor-Leste.
Lemos is also currently a lecturer on sustainable farming and on public arts and culture at the University of Timor-Leste in the nation’s capital, Dili.
But when he is not busy in the academe, he hits the road on his motorbike, traveling to small communities to see where else he can promote permaculture.
In hailing Lemos as one of its 2023 honorees, the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) notes how the “charismatic Lemos works with people from all walks of life … drawn by his open, humble, down-to-earth manner.”
“More than just about method and techniques, Lemos promotes a whole way of looking at nature and people,” RMAF said in its citation. “[We] recognize his indomitable spirit in uplifting the lives of local communities, his vision and passion for integrating local and indigenous culture … and for being truly a man of and for his people, and thus for the whole world.”