ACTIVIST Jaime Tadeo is not exactly picking one advocacy over another. But lately, this staunch agrarian reform advocate is making his presence felt in promoting organic farming in the face of yet another looming rice crisis.
“The redistribution of land alone will not solve the multi-faceted problems of Filipino farmers. Government support to strengthen Philippine agriculture is also much needed,” he said.
Ka Jimmy, chairperson of Paragos-Pilipinas, is now actively involved and is one of the leading personalities in the Go Organic! Philippines, a consortium of nongovernment organizations led by the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM) and the La Liga Policy Institute (La Liga), which is taking the lead in implementing Phase I of the Organic FIELDS Support Program (OFSP) in partnership with the Department of Agriculture (DA) through the Bureau of Soils and Water Management (BSWM).
In fact, Ka Jimmy is the spokesperson of Go Organic! Philippines, which is now aggressively promoting organic farming in seven pilot areas in Luzon. This is in preparation for the immediate conversion of 10% of the country’s 1.9 million hectares of rice fields into organic rice fields.
The campaign aims to promote organic farming among farmers, a tough nut to crack, considering that the country’s farmers, particularly rice and vegetable producers, are already hooked to conventional farming, which makes use of imported petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides.
“We need to convince farmers to stop using chemical fertilizers. And the only way to do it is to give them a viable option. Going organic is a viable option,” he said.
Ka Jimmy, chairman of the National Council of Rice Farmers in the Philippines a vocal critic of the government’s rice program, said he supports the campaign to convince farming to shift from conventional farming to organic farming, because it promotes sustainable agriculture and will be beneficial to farmers through increased income, better health, and better environment.
In fact, Ka Jimmy has been into organic farming even before the OFSP was launched in November last year.
In 2004, Ka Jimmy started to convert his 2,000 sq. m farm in Barangay Culyanin, Plaridel, Bulacan into an organic farm, making use of organic fertilizer and organic pesticides available commercially at first, before finally producing his own organic farm inputs for his rice farm.
Today, his organic rice field boasts of being 100% chemical-based fertilizer and pesticide-free.
“Nagbalik na ang talangkang bukid, dalag at palaka sa bukid ko,” he says.
These are just some of the beneficial creatures other rice fields next to Ka Jimmy’s do not have.
“Mamamatay sila sa ibang bukid dahil sa nakalalasong kemikal na mula sa bono at pestisidyo,” he said.
Nature, Ka Jimmy said, has its way of communicating with farmers.
“I was very surprised and happy to see these creatures back in my rice fields. They seem to be telling me that my efforts paid off,” he said.
Ka Jimmy said he learned to produce organic fertilizer and put up his “Bokasi” through his Japanese-friends. “Bokasi” is derived from the Japanese term for compost.
“It converts carbonized rice hull and animal manure such as that of chicken into organic fertilizer much faster,” Ka Jimmy said.
“Mayron akong maliit na manukan na pinagkukunan ko ng compost material para sa bukid ko,” he says.
The same organic rice field, Ka Jimmy said, used to be “biologically dead” because of excessive use of inorganic fertilizer and pesticides.
Ka Jimmy admitted that like any other farmer, he is hooked to excessive use of petrochemical based fertilizer and pesticides. He started planting rice in 1962, when he was still a government employee working under the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Extension. That was the same year the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) came to the Philippines and started to introduce their rice technology, Ka Jimmy said.
Before the turn of the century, he said rice farms in the country are already unproductive, citing a newspaper report which quoted Josue Descalsota, a soil expert from the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice). The soil export revealed that based on test conducted by PhilRice team, 91 of the 144 rice paddy fields in 19 rice-producing provinces in the country no longer have enough nutrients to sustain yields.
Ka Jimmy said decades of excessive use of inorganic fertilizer did not only destroyed the ecological balance of the soil in his rice field, but led to health problems related to exposure to toxic chemicals.
“Exposure to toxic chemicals commonly found in fertilizers and pesticides cause skin and respiratory diseases,” he said.
In Bintog, Bulacan, farmer-leader Manuel dela Rosa, a friend of Ka Jimmy’s died of leukemia. Exposure to chemical, Ka Jimmy said, affected him. “His red blood cell becomes white,” Ka Jimmy said.
He said reports of such deaths associated with exposure to harmful chemicals found in fertilizer and pesticides, is no longer new in Bulacan.
“It makes life shorter by 12 to 15 years,” Ka Jimmy said, quoting a scientific research on the ill effect of inorganic chemicals to farmers like him.
Beside, Ka Jimmy warned that continuous use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides contribute to global warming and climate change.
“It destroys the ozone layer, making us more vulnerable to skin disease, and threaten our human existence because of its impacts to our environment,” Ka Jimmy said.
The physiological disorder of the soil after long years of exposure to such harmful chemicals – the multiple nutrient deficiency which makes soil unproductive – convinced Ka Jimmy to go organic.
“This is dangerous because rice is the staple food,” he said.
In 1962, he said for ever kilo of inorganic fertilizer, 15 kilos of grain can be produced. Today, for every kilo of inorganic fertilizer, only six to seven kilos of grain can be produced.
During the same period in Nueva Ecija, he said at least five bags of inorganic fertilizer are needed to produce 100 kilos of rice grain.
Today, to produce the same volume of rice grain, at least 10 to 15 bags of inorganic fertilizer per hectare are needed.
Ka Jimmy warned that there will come a time that the soil will become too acidic to produce rice, no matter how much fertilizer is used.
Ka Jimmy said to bring back the natural soil nutrients, the excessive use of harmful chemicals in soil should be completely stopped and the only way to do it without sacrificing food security, the burden of which rests on the shoulder of farmers is by introducing natural nutrients found in organic fertilizers back into the soil.
“The solution is to go organic!” he said.
