DA, LGUs start crafting ‘localized’ food security plan

Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol (PNA File Photo)

MANILA — The Department of Agriculture (DA) will be meeting with mayors nationwide starting October to find out how to secure food supply in each locality.

“We’ll ask what the towns need,” Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said on the sidelines of a meeting with provincial governors in Metro Manila last week on the damages brought by Typhoon Ompong (Mangkhut) in mid-September.

The upcoming food security meetings will be by clusters, Piñol said, covering Northern Luzon, Southern Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao.

Irrigation, farm-to-market roads, and post-harvest facilities might be among what the towns need to produce food for their respective populations, he said.

Piñol said attaining food security in the towns will have its effect on the national scale, amid ballooning Philippine population and climate change.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), food security exists “when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food, which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”

“We’d like each town to have its food security plan,” Piñol said.

For the meetings, the agriculture czar expects to get information like a town’s population, topography, existing and potential areas for growing food, and needed production interventions like irrigation.

He also expects the plan to identify possible sources of food if a town cannot produce enough food for its population due to topographic constraints and other factors.

Several governors of typhoon-hit provinces told Piñol what long-term food-growing interventions they think are needed in their areas of jurisdiction.

Among those mentioned was the irrigation for Quirino province’s corn-producing areas and rain-fed rice fields.

Also cited were watershed reforestation and desilting of major rivers in Luzon to prevent flooding, which is a threat to agricultural production.

Piñol said the DA will gather the towns’ food security plans and include these in the national food security plan that the agriculture department aims to come up with.

Such national plan will serve as the government’s basis for programs and expenditures for ensuring the availability of affordable food for all Filipinos. “This country can produce enough food for its people,” Piñol said.