Bringing A Climate Change To Philippine Agriculture

MANILA: Climate change is a disaster waiting to happen, but Philippine agriculture has so far shown resistance to global warming. Two things convince me that this is so:

One, the Department of Agriculture (DA) has not adapted to the reality of climate change, except in words. It has no dedicated climate change program – in fact, the whole DA should be restructured to face this universal threat. It is now well into 2016. In 2014, the DA was reported that by 2015, the DA will "transform the entire DA budget into an adaptation budget," that it would be "making climate change considerations in all plans, budgets, programs so that climate change is mainstreamed by all offices under the DA," said DA Climate Change Office Director Alicia Ilaga (Pia Ranada, 08 April 2014, Rappler, rappler.com). I have not read or heard of a DA Action Plan on Climate Change; I surf the Web many times a day and today, I visited the DA website, www.da.gov.ph, a few times but it kept telling me, "This site is down for maintenance. Please check back again soon." Somebody is sleeping on the job?

That really doesn't matter – there is the National Climate Change Action Plan 2011-2028 (downloadable as pdf from climate.gov.ph), where the DA is assigned only specific duties, not a commanding role vis-à-vis climate change and agriculture. What's the matter, the Climate Change Commission does not acknowledge the major roles agriculture play in the economy and in climate change? If at all, the DA should have insisted on a primary role. I say the DA should be initiating national actions in development agriculture for the good of all. INA DAGA.

Two, what we have been doing in agriculture has merely been mitigating the adverse effects, and yet feebly. The Kidapawan imbroglio is a case in point, where there was no mention of any DA project or training or farmer field school where farmers had been taught how to address climate change. The farmers are not helpless under El Niño, but they have to be taught what to do, and then assisted in doing what they have to do – long before El Niño. Agriculture is a major contributor to climate change with all those greenhouse gases (GNGs): carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. What has the DA done about limiting agriculture's substantial & direct contribution of GNGs to global warming? None that I know.

Note that in climate change, adapt is different from mitigate, where adapt is to fit a specific situation and mitigate is to make less severe or alleviate, after the fact or an extreme event like a drought. I'll simplify and say to adapt is to prevent damage (before the event happens) while to mitigate is reduce damage (during and after the event).

To adapt to climate change in agriculture, is for instance to plant a drought-resistant rice variety, which will survive despite lack of rain or irrigation water. Another adaptation is to practice conservation agriculture, which is "a set of soil management practices that minimize the disruption of the soil's surface, composition and natural biodiversity" (Cornell University, mannlib.cornell.edu), and therefore conserve the water already within the system. In other words, minimum tillage or even zero cultivation, such as the rice planting approach called System of Rice Intensification (SRI), should be practiced by the farmers, since it limits the greenhouse gases while it maximizes the yields. Of course, the DA, PhilRice and IRRI know all about SRI, so there is no reason why it is not practiced in the Philippines especially now that El Niño is browbeating us. If the DA doesn't know about nitrous oxide, it's time it did!

And to mitigate the damage of the crop by El Niño is to prevent further loss of harvest by irrigating, if possible. If there is no source of emergency irrigation water, there cannot be any mitigation done on a standing rice crop. That is why adaptation is more important than mitigation; don't everybody know that prevention is worth more than a pound of cure?

And that is why I say that for Philippine agriculture to respond intelligently and now, the Department of Agriculture itself needs a climate change!

The simplest and fastest way the DA can bring its region-wide climate change initiative is to set up in each of the 81 provinces of the Philippines 81 Climate Change Demo Farms of any crop and/or livestock combination where, for instance it can demonstrate:

(1)     Microdosing: The amounts of nitrogenous fertilizers can be minimized, to minimize the emission of nitrous oxide, the most dangerous greenhouse gas in the world, as in fact it is 300 times more powerful as a heat trapper than carbon dioxide. Yes, nitrogen can be minimized while yields can be maximized, if microdosing is practiced, that is, applying a 3-finger pinch of fertilizer to a hill or plant growing in the field.

(2)     Rain harvesting: Watersheds can be raised where none grew before. This has been successfully shown in India, in the village called Adarsha, where farmers themselves harvested (and continue harvesting) rain to provide water for their farm crops, fruit trees and farm houses. And because of the Adarsha watershed, the village has prospered beyond imagination.

Microdosing and rain harvesting are two approaches to agriculture that help farmers adapt to climate change. And both of these I have learned from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), which is based in India, and which had the first and only Filipino Director General for a total of 15 years: William Dollente Dar, an Ilocano from Ilocos Sur.

I have been writing about and learning from ICRISAT science since February 2007. And I continue learning from ICRISAT; the DA should too. The other day, I received my soft copy of the Framework For Modernizing & Industrializing Philippine Agriculture: 2016 And Beyond, a pdf of 37 pages ("Final Draft as of 15 April 2016" it says right on top of page 1); the authors being William D Dar and Rosana P Mula. My copy was emailed by the senior author, all of 10,800 words excluding references, tables and figures. I will share with you next time about the Framework. Right now, all I want to say is that we have much to learn from ICRISAT in the person of its former & well-loved DG, who is a Filipino and now the President of the Inanglupa Movement that he founded in the year he was retiring from ICRISAT, 2014. Good work is never done.

What about the Department of Agriculture? Enough good climate change work has never been done.