The Philippine government in partnership with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) have officially started the implementation of a $39.2 million project aimed at strengthening farmers’ resilience to climate change, involving the Department of Agriculture, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration.
The project, dubbed Adapting Philippine Agriculture to Climate Change (APA), is a seven-year initiative meant to boost the resilience of rural communities that are reliant on agriculture. It covers five regions, nine provinces, and 100 towns across the country.
It will provide localized climate information services and let farmers adopt climate resilient farming practices, particularly enterprises led by women and indigenous groups. It will strengthen regulatory frameworks, enhance market systems, and improve knowledge management to mainstream and scale up climate-resilient agriculture across the country that is ranked fourth in the world in terms of being affected by extreme weather events.
“It’s about creating opportunities for growth in the fields and through agricultural enterprises, ensuring that future generations continue to benefit from the rich agricultural heritage of the Philippines – a nation sustained by farming for centuries,” FAO country representative Lionel Henri Valentin Dabbadie said.
The DA recently reported that the farm sector’s losses due to the southwest monsoon totaled P600.83 million, affecting the livelihood of 11,170 farmers.
Our country’s extreme vulnerability to the most devastating effects of climate change demands that efforts to improve our resiliency be given more attention, not just for the present, but more so for the future, as the effects are expected to intensify further before any of the human interventions, if ever they are enough and on time, can finally kick in and mitigate the effects. Of all those affected, Filipino farmers are the ones who are expected to suffer the most, so any and all attempts to strengthen their resiliency is always appreciated.
Hopefully this effort by the UN FAO and the Philippines’ DA and PAGASA will make a dent in helping improve the resiliency of the Filipino farmer, because even if our government takes pride in our resiliency, the most affected will always appreciate efforts to help us weather those literal and figurative storms better.*
