Urban farming can help feed Asia - experts

MANILA, Philippines - Urban agriculture can considerably help feed Asia.

This is particularly true in countries, the Philippines included, whose farmlands continue to shrink owing to urbanization, industrialization, and housing needs.

Across Asia, there is now a renewed focus on agriculture, the sector expected and relied upon to provide the food needs of the region’s burgeoning population, said Gil C. Saguiguit Jr. director of the Philippine government-hosted Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization-Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEAMEO SEARCA).

“We must now spin agriculture’s wheels faster and generate as much production as we can from available resources at our disposal,” he stressed at an international forum billed “Feeding Asia in the 21st Century” held recently in Singapore.

Attended by about 200 government representatives, large-scale agricultural producers, farmer groups, researchers, and development partners, the high-level meeting was the inaugural International Conference on Asian food Security (ICAFS) convened by SEARCA and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Los Baños-based SEARCA is one of the 20 “centers of excellence” of SEAMEO, an intergovernment treaty body founded in 1965 to foster cooperation among Southeast Asian nations in the fields of education, science, and culture.

As population growth rate continues to outstrip food production, it behooves Asian countries to fasttrack the development and use of new technologies, crop varieties, and production techniques; and optimize production resources, Dr. Saguiguit stressed in his speech at ICAFS.

“It means either producing more from land already devoted to agriculture or bringing new areas under cultivation,” he said.

An option that is surfacing is urban agriculture, which is a consideration for a country like Singapore.

“Agriculture is a small sector in the economy of Singapore, largely due to land constraints’ brought about by industrialization, urbanization, public housing needs, and water conservation, pointed out a SEARCA publication titled Southeast Asian Agriculture and Development Primer Series.

This island-state has a land area of only 658 square kilometers inhabited by about 4.3 million people, including permanent residents and foreign workers.

In the past quarter of a century, Singapore’s farmlands decreased from 15,000 hectares in the 1960s and 8,000 ha in 1980 to 1,500 ha in 2005.

Agrotechnology Parks, however, have been developed “to maintain farming in land allocated for other developments in the next 20-30 years.”

Dr. Saguiguit emphasized: “This new frontier clearly has significant implications for highly populated countries moving toward urbanization. In the end, the combined incremental food produced via urban agriculture could be a buffer should the traditional sources in the rural areas become unreliable.”

The Philippines is also typical of highly populated countries whose farmlands are being gobbled by business enterprises, subdivisions, sports complexes, and other purposes.

To negate the impact of such activities on the country’s food production program, local governments have been resorting to urban agriculture.

Example is “The Joy of Urban Farming Program” now being implemented by the Quezon City government.

The program aims to set up thousands of vegetable gardens in all barangays and schools in Quezon City, according to Vice Mayor Joy Belmonte who, with the full support of the QC government headed by Mayor Herbert Bautista, conceived “The Joy of Farming” as a sequel to the “Halamanan ng Bayan” (Community Garden) initiated by former mayor and now Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr.

Many base and school farms have been set up under the expanded program, with a showcase garden established at the QC Memorial Circle in Diliman.

The program is supported by the Department of Agriculture (DA), Education (DepEd), and Science and Technology (DOST); various instrumentalities of the QC government; Liga ng Barangay; Gawad Kalinga; and Allied Botanical Corp.

Similar programs are DepEd’s ‘School-based Feed and Nutrition Program” pieced together by UP Los Baños and SEARCA through the initiative of Education Secretary Armin Luistro and “Oh My Gulay!” spearheaded by Sen. Edgardo J. Angara to encourage vegetable production among school children.