Revisiting food self-sufficiency

One of the questions in my mind when Cebu shut down its ports last year at the start of the pandemic was about the food self-sufficiency of the island. In a worst-case scenario, will we be able to meet the food needs of our population from our own production rather than from importation?

Thankfully, we did not suffer a serious food shortage. Inter-island trading slowed down but did not stop. Imported agriculture products still flowed in to feed our relatively dense population.

But still, our trade-reliant economy is still experiencing food insecurity. Notably, agriculture merely accounts for an estimated 6.4% of the economy of Central Visayas.

In a privilege speech the other day, Cebu City Councilor Alvin Dizon urged the city administration to implement the food bank and urban food gardening ordinances of the city. Dizon, who authored these ordinances, said more Cebuanos have struggled to put food on their table because of the pandemic.

The pandemic, indeed, forced us to examine our capability to ensure our own food supply in the event of a critical disruption. Prior to the pandemic, the agriculture sector in Central Visayas grew by 0.8% in 2019, accounting for merely 0.1% of the 5.9% regional gross domestic product growth for the year, according to a report by the Philippine News Agency (PNA).

Based on data from the Philippine Statistics Authority, our agricultural lands still produce mostly coconut and corn crops, thus highlighting the need for small community farms and households to fill in the gap in vegetable production.

This has spurred local governments to launch programs to bolster crop and livestock production. The Cebu provincial government, for example, launched last year the vegetable gardening project called SUGBUsog, which stands for “Sugbuanong Busog, Luwas, ug Himsog”. In recent weeks, Governor Gwen Garcia can be seen doing the rounds across the province where she visited various municipal nurseries supported by the provincial government.

These initiatives may not result in bolstering food security overnight, but it highlights the importance of agricultural production in the development of Cebu. Hopefully, the private sector and various community cooperatives will take their cue from these initiatives.

The Department of Agriculture has allocated about P454 million budget for the farm sector in the province this year, slightly higher from P431 million last year, according to the PNA report. But with Central Visayas as the fourth largest regional contributor of the national Gross Domestic Product (P594 billion in 2018), a budget like that seems relatively small.

Cebu is the center of education in the region and has one of the largest concentrations of knowledgeable and skilled workers. That means we have the potential to become a powerhouse in agricultural technology like Israel or Thailand. Severe water and land limitations did not deter Israel from developing its agriculture. Now, its agricultural innovations are helping feed the world affected by climate change.

Cebu has a rich history not just in trade but also in agriculture. This week I got hold of the 2021 edition of the late Dionisio A. Sy’s book “A Short History of Cebu (1500-1890’s) and the Anti-Spanish Revolution in Cebu”. It narrated how our island was a self-sustaining community during the pre-Hispanic times. Our agricultural sector further developed when the Cebu port opened to international trade in 1863 and foreign commercial houses provided additional sources of credit to the sector. Credit meant having access to technology that increased production.

Today, we are faced with climate change-induced problems that should force us to revisit the role of agricultural self-sufficiency in our development goals. If we’re slow to act on the erratic changes that happen in a disaster-prone world, we might find ourselves at the low end of global food supply chain.

Again, on this matter we can learn from our history. In the late 1940s, our sugar exports rotted in Manila warehouses because of poor technological methods which resulted to more impurities in the product. Our overreliance on one crop also resulted in the financial demise of well-to-do families who lost their sugarcane fields to creditors after a series of typhoons in the 1850s and the world sugar price crash of 1884.

Today, we see an overreliance on the service sector that comprise the majority of our GDP. Let’s learn from what’s happening with the COVID vaccines now; when our cash will be useless as we depend on our food supply from others and there’s lack of it.