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Safe Food Manufacturing

I am not sure if you will agree with me that manufacturing might be a broad label for the food production realm or the industry of food production. The word manufacturing evokes factories and mass production every single time. It might not be that, because cottage industries also involve some level of manufacture. So I’d like to propose that we talk about production instead of manufacturing. That is closer to the ideals of small-scale, diverse, intensive agriculture. And that food production really has to do with not only making the food but also making it eventually available to the consumers.

I’d like to think about it in two ways: one is production and the other is on the eater. Most of the things that are discussed in many workshops and events are on the production side. But I keep going back to the notion that “bawat subo ay boto”. We are in an election every day of the year because when we choose what we eat when we make that decision, every 3 times to 5 times a day, we actually make a vote. Each fast-food joint is actually a window into a changing agricultural landscape, like potatoes in the rice terraces, for example.

I’d like us to look at the eater first. How the food reaches the homes is an issue of how manufacturers try to treat their production – trying to keep it stored, to keep it packaged. That dilemma of food producers has a lot to do with what the impacts on the food are. The decision of the buyer is at a single point in time and the decision is made for them if they don’t think ahead. So as an eater, kung bawat subo ay boto, we are obligated to meditate on the source of our food and on the eventual end of the food; so that we think of where it might have come from, where it might end after we eat it, after where our bodies dispose of it.

We also have to meditate on the positioning of our eating in the food chain because we think of the food chain as animals. We think of ourselves at the end of the food chain, when actually it is a food web. And if you meditate on the positioning of our decisions of eating in the food web, we may be able to connect with ourselves better, not only on our

communities and neighborhood but on the community of life, in general.

Many decisions though are individual. It really helps if there are policies that shape behavior. I learned a lot from the tobacco control advocacy. I think it was at this point when I had to say that education has come to mean different things to me. And if it’s argued about, I get very uncomfortable. If you go head to head educating, we are hopelessly at the mercy of large corporations that also educate through their advertising and through other means. It’s in tobacco control that you learn that no amount of education will work if the father smokes and it’s a normal thing. So we have to re-think what is normal. And in praying before meals or in meditating on the source and ends of our meals, maybe that is the time when we can also meditate on what has become normal for us.

The challenge is, in the past decade the illnesses of the planet have moved from infectious diseases to non-communicable diseases (NCD). NCDs, as the World Health Organization (WHO) call them, are basically diseases that spring from lifestyle choices. The major lifestyle choice is, of course, deciding what to eat. Since it’s a 3 times a day activity, or to some it’s five times a day, or a decision to cut it down to 3 or 4, which is an environmental decision as well, that decision has many, many environmental consequences. While each meal is important, it’s also important to think of staples and diets and cuisines.

One of the major works that are considered the bibles of safe production decisions, to-eat-what-type-of-food philosophy, is the omnivore’s dilemma which is the ecological history of our meals. So even if you make each decision count and even if your meals are ecological, if the cuisine itself has been lost, then that decision is all the harder. The decision becomes more and more difficult because you are not following a staple, you are not following a cuisine. It’s much easier if you follow a cuisine, then you treat yourself to high valuable added types of food once in a while. We also can’t just let go off of very well made, high value types of food that most people cannot afford. But if they are only treats that is inserted in cuisines, then probably the world could experience much more high- value types of foods that are high in nutrition and are traditional. It will also revive traditional ways which ensure that they are prepared ecologically. Because traditional ways of preparing foods, also part of the cuisine, may have clues as to how the ecology can be supported.

As to the decisions for each type, there’s also the notion of what is sufficient. I refer to the tagalog term, “Ano ba yung sapat?”, “Kailan ka mabubusog?”. In ecology the lion would sit right next to the gazelle if he is full. He would not go after the gazelle. Nagkataon, ang mga tao ay walanang kabusugan. This is very, very clear especially in what WHO is being alarmed about – the sugar-sweet of beverages. Because if you eat something that has five (5) tablespoons of sugar, you feel umay. Umay is no longer felt in the case of sugar-sweet beverage. You don’t get umay. Dumadaan lang yung sugar. The evolutionary ways by which our health is protected is being shortcut by the industry para uminom tayo ng uminom ng mataas na sugar.

We are also going towards mono-cultures. You cannot buy many vegetables anymore, except for pakbet. When in fact you can go to the back of your house where there are weeds that can sustain you probably for a week. Just the pancit-pancitan alone is a really good salad if you allow it to grow on your garden. The wild ampalaya and the wild pepino are really, really good, tasty and crunchy. Once you start to eat fresh, it will be

a treat each time.

As for producers, how can we keep the economic goals low volume? If its low volume it has to be high value, right? If its high value, it’s no longer available to the community. How can we keep quality high but still make it available to the most number of people? One of the answers to that is to keep high value foods produced by lots of people. Therefore, creating networks and webs of producers, instead of the mono- cultures, would be the answer to the counter-culture to food manufacturing that is mono- culture – single factory that is less nutritious. The moment that you need to preserve, it can be preserved locally in low volume like pickling, etcetera. But the moment you need to reach hundreds of millions of people, billions of billions served, that is when you threaten the food system. That is when you threaten the diets and cuisines of the people.

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Organic Agriculture Program of Negros Occidental

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, organic agriculture is an effective strategy for mitigating climate change by building robust soils that are better adapted to extreme weather conditions associated with climate change.

The Organic Agriculture Program in Negros Occidental started with the Public- Private Initiative in Organic Agriculture which established the organic vegetable farm in the rear of Capitol Building in 2005 and the 15 pilot organic villages. The components of the program include: trainings and Information, education and campaign (IEC); production of organic products (agri and aqua); production of organic fertilizer; promotion and

marketing of organic products; research, development and extension; policy and advocacy; and support services & networking.

The Organic Agriculture Program has numerous accomplishments such as:

• Conversion of almost 15,000 hectares of land to organic agriculture.
• Established laboratory production centers for biological agents in five (5) of the six (6) targeted villages.
• Increased farmers’ average production and income by 25 to 30 percent through provision of inputs and hands-on trainings on different organic farming technologies
• Continuous assistance, collaboration and coordination with specific organized organic commodity groups of small farmers.
• Organized provincial, city, municipal technical committees on organic agriculture in 32 cities & municipalities
• Continuous hands-on trainings of field technicians & farmers on organic farming technologies and capacity building
• Annual celebration of “Negros Island Organic Farmers Festival” to link agri- fairs and fair-trade in the local and national level.
• Trained 1,500 farmers and people’s organizations (POs) and individuals on mushroom culture and production

Through the Organic Agriculture Program the province received numerous awards like the Outstanding Province on Organic Agriculture Program Implementation in 2013 and Regional Organic Agriculture Achievers Award in 2014.

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Organic Agriculture

Organic agriculture promotes an ecologically sound, socially acceptable and economically viable and technically feasible production of food. This is through the reduction of external inputs by avoiding the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals, while enhancing productivity without destroying the soil and harming farmers, consumers and the environment.

The elements of organic crop production include soil management, crop management or multiple cropping, seeds and planting materials and pest management. Soil management involves composting, application of organic matter and preventing soil erosion. Pest management involves crop rotation, mixed cropping, trap cropping, selective weeding, sanitation, net bagging, net tunnels and use of flowers.

Organic agriculture is more about fairness and respect than it is about parts-per- billion of pesticide residues.

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Province-wide Zero Waste Campaign

“It is high time for human beings to take the right action towards saving the earth.” This was how Gov. Padilla ended her talk where she shared why and how they implemented a province-wide zero waste campaign. With the aims to maximally increase the capacity of all the 275 target barangays in the 15 municipalities of Nueva Vizcaya and to enable Nueva Vizcaya to be the first province to attain compliance to RA 9003 by diverting solid waste from dumpsites and/or landfills, they started conceptualizing and planning their Zero Waste Program in partnership with all the LGUs and For the Love of Mother Earth Inc. Their strategies included motivational and technical trainings, prolonged and continuous assistance to the barangays, coupled with monitoring and evaluation schemes.

The implementation started with an assessment and green audit where they conducted profiling, baseline data survey and waste assessment and characterization. Trainings on Ecological Solid Waste Management were held in the barangays and in

schools. Ordinances were then developed followed by intensive information and education campaigns (IEC). Materials Recovery and Vermicomposting Facilities were also constructed and enforcement support for the barangay and monitoring scheme were put in place.

The accomplishment report as of December 2015, after its second phase, shows that a total of 190 barangays and 20 schools were already covered by the program. One hundred thirty six (136) barangays and 20 school MRFs, and 76 vermi-composting facilities have been constructed and were fully functioning. Organic gardening which uses the biofertilizer produced from the VRF is being practiced and a livelihood development program for the waste processors has been established. Several creative activities like Earth Day Fair, Search for Model Barangay, Best MRF contest and others were also held to further promote the program.

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Update on Conference of Parties 21 in Paris

Distinguished guests, good afternoon to everyone. Bon jour.

It is a great pleasure to be with all of you today for this 1st Philippine Environment Summit. I thank you for this opportunity that is given to me to share with you some insights about the 21st Climate Conference, also called as COP21, which took place in Paris last December.

Almost a year ago, in February 2015, we started our preparation for COP 21 here in Manila. We embarked “On The Road to COP21.” Indeed, when President Hollande made a state visit to the Philippines, it was the first-ever state visit by a French President to the Philippines. So, this was a very important visit for our two countries. But more than that, it was a very important visit because we have put an eye on the agenda with this issue on climate change: the fight against climate change, the preparation of COP21, the collaboration of our two countries in these common tasks of preparing COP21 in order to achieve a success there.

So last year, 27th of February 2015, was the very day when both presidents, President Hollande and President Aquino, jointly launched the “Manila Call to Action on Climate Change”. This call was a call for the mobilization of the international community to fight against climate change. It was a call also for international solidarity in this fight. Solidarity, indeed, was the core of what we tried to do during COP21 in order to secure an agreement.

Since this visit on February 2015, the French embassy here in the Philippines has worked side-by-side with many stakeholders in the Philippines – government agencies like the Climate Change Commission (CCC), the National Youth Commission (NYC), also the academe, civil society, media, and the private sector to ensure that we will be collectively prepared to help and contribute to the success of COP21. So during last year we had high- level meetings. We organized conferences and events such as movie screenings, even a bike ride on the streets of Intramuros and a concert to raise awareness on this social climate conference.

So now I am standing in front of you, today. I am very honored to present the result of this conference – what the world has achieved in the fight against climate change. As you all know, we were able to reach our goal, which was to secure an agreement at Paris in December – an international agreement both ambitious and universal and somehow legally binding. This goal was a difficult one to reach. When we opened COP21, we were not sure that we would be able to make it but of course, we all knew, both the French presidency even the delegation, we all knew, what was at stake and that we had to secure this agreement. In spite the difficulties, the divergent interests that we had to overcome in our discussions, we had to do it. We all know that the fight against climate change is for us to tackle now. It is now that we have to act. We cannot defer anymore, we all know that.

So this is why the Paris Agreement has been regarded as historic by many. This is one of the few examples indeed where the use of that word ‘historic’ seems appropriate. The participation of more than 150 heads of state and government, among them was, of course, his Excellency President Aquino, to the opening of the conference on November 30th, the commitment of thousands of cities, companies and NGOs in the Lima Paris Action Plan and the adaption at the end of the conference on December 12 of the Paris Agreement, is indeed historic.

For the first time ever, this Agreement has brought all nations to work on a common cause based on their past and future responsibilities on this issue of climate change. There was never-ever an international agreement on the fight against climate change in the history of humankind; but, now we have one. And this one is the step that we will use to build a better future. So we can really say that the adoption of the Paris Agreement was an unprecedented political victory and it will present a turning point towards low carbon resilient development. “This is a turning point”, those were the words of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

The Paris Agreement offers the best possible balance. At this stage, it prepares for the future and it offers solutions for the present. It is universal, ambitious, fair and legally binding. A distinction between developed and developing countries, based on their capabilities to commit, was the most apparent in each of the key stages in the negotiations. Providing the necessary finances, an approach of receptiveness and determined compromise helped strike the right balance between ambitions, universality and solidarity.

The Paris Agreement is an ambitious agreement. It establishes the limits, the increased earth’s temperatures of well below 2 degrees Celsius (2oC) by the end of this century, and pursuing efforts to even limit it to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5oC) which is one of the main objectives of the Philippine delegation. And this was taken into consideration. The French Presidency made what was necessary to have it put into the agreement. So the official target is still 2oC because this is the most reasonable compromise we could get. But at the same time, we wrote down in the agreement that we have to keep in mind that if we can and we have to, we can do better and limit it to 1.5oC. So we will first concretely try to reach this 2oC target; keeping in mind that we can do better. In concrete terms this ambition takes the form of a global emissions road map, the peaking of emissions as soon as possible, and emissions’ neutrality second half of this century.

The Paris Agreement is also a differentiated agreement. For the first time, all countries are committing to a universal agreement reflecting the commitments of developed countries to reduce their emissions and acknowledging the gradual convergence of developing countries towards such a reduction taking into account respective national circumstances and capabilities. So everyone must make an effort at its own pace based on constraints and capacities.

It is also an inclusive agreement. The Agreement affirms the obligations to support developing countries in their efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. The accompanying decision extends the commitment of one hundred billion dollars ($100B) per year until 2025 which will then serve as a basis for more ambitious financial targets.
For the first time, and thanks to the efforts of the Philippine Negotiation team, adaptation to the effects of climate change was treated with equal importance as the

reduction of the greenhouse emissions (GHG). So the agreement sets an overall objective for adaptation and affirms the need to rebalance finances especially public funds and ground-based resources. The issue of loss and damage is formally recognized and an appropriate framework is introduced. This loss and damage mechanism compels countries with higher carbon emissions to compensate the more vulnerable countries, essentially those who have lost and been damaged most by the offense of climate change.

Lastly, the agreement establishes and enhances framework for transparency that is universal and flexible so as to ensure effectiveness over time and build confidence between nations. It will help drive the progress of each country on mitigation, adaptation and support while taking into account the respective capabilities of each country. Consequently, we now have an agreement on the climate suitable for all parties, for all countries, for vulnerable islands to oil producers, from emerging economies and to the least developed countries. Each of them can identify themselves in the Paris Agreement and this is the result in which we, as precedent of the COP, are most proud of.

So what are the next steps now? Basically, 2015 was a year of negotiation and a year of decision but 2016 will be the year for action. After a formal signing ceremony on the 22nd of April this year in New York, the agreement will be open for ratification by states. It will enter into force after ratification by 55 countries representing at least 55% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Implementation of the agreement will lead to the creation of mechanisms for raising ambition over time, providing financial support, and tracking support and efforts. Every country will have to submit a national contribution every 5 years. For this COP21, each country was asked to submit a national contribution on what it wanted to achieve in order to reduce its GHG emissions. And as you know the Philippines submitted a national contribution that foresees that the country will reduce its GHG emissions by 70% by 2030, if financial support is provided. This national contribution will have to be updated every five (5) years and it will be the same for every country. But what is important there is that those contributions will increase ambitiously each time. And this will start in 2023. This will be the first time we review those contributions.

Regarding the finances, the Agreement establishes an obligation for the developed countries to provide and mobilize finances based on the principles of progression. It also recognizes that the public funds should play a significant role in climate fights. The Agreement establishes mechanisms to facilitate implementation and promote compliance. It will support states from facilitation rather than definitive point of view in implementation and foster national commitments. Its rules and procedures will be established in the next few years so that it can start operating by 2020, when the agreement comes into force.

The Agreement reached in Paris last December sends a strong signal for businesses, investors, local governments and citizens, the signal that they are waiting for in order to strengthen their own commitments. It will speed up the process, the directing of financial flows from high emitting sectors, especially the fossil fuel industry, towards a low carbon economy. And indeed the first hours and days following the securing of the agreement in Paris have already showed the first tranche of investments being re-directed in this sense. We are seeing, for example, the rates of clean energy investments rising while those in fossil fuels has been stagnating and even falling.

The Agreement will also provide developing countries with the resources they need to extend access to renewable energy sources, curve deforestation and implement

sustainable agriculture. It will also generate a momentum needed to continue the ecological and energy transition in developed countries and create millions of green jobs. It will enable people everywhere on earth to breathe cleaner air, gain access to decent quality of life and see their fundamental rights respected. It will help reduce risks and complaints linked to either competition for non-renewable resources like water, for example, or to climate impacts that have not been preventive or sufficiently well managed.

So the Paris Agreement is the beginning of a new era of collective sharing for the preservation of our planet. It also needs to exist and be fully implemented. It needs the involvement from all of us: from developed and developing countries, from civil society to private sector, to the government, to take a united stand and do our part for the future of our planet. Of course the Paris Agreement will not solve everything, but going back to what I said earlier, we have to see it for what it is – a turning point.

This is the first ever on our ladder for a better future. Before this step, we didn’t have one. This is our first time to have an international agreement and this very result has been so difficult to achieve. Through the years we have had many international conferences that failed, but we knew that we could not fail in Paris. So we have an Agreement and we have to, like I said earlier, take it for what it is.

This is the framework that we need to enable us to be more efficient in our common fight against climate change. So now we have this framework and mechanisms that are in the Agreement, which are progressive. This is indeed the way we wanted it to be. It is a progressive fight that we have to achieve together and everything will be implemented progressively. But it will require that we remain mobilized so that we as individuals, citizens, in every country, maintain pressure on governance, on the private sector and on ourselves. We keep being mobilized and we do what is necessary to implement the Agreement so that we are forced to do what has been decided in Paris so that we indeed, reduce our GHG emissions. We transform our economies so that they are low carbon and that allows us to have better quality of life.

This is what is at stake. The Paris Agreement is the first step and for it to be implemented or not, for it to lead to the next step onward, is up to us. And thinking about that, we should think that we can be proud of this outcome. But the most difficult is still to be done and we still have a lot of efforts to do. We should bear in mind that if we have to do that, it is not for ourselves but it is for the youth. It is for the future generations so that we can give them a better planet than what it is now.

In order to achieve this, we need a tool. This tool is the Paris Agreement that was secured last December 12, 2015 in Paris. But we have to do what is necessary to have it implemented and this is where we have to act collectively now. In the year to come, here in the Philippines, the French embassy will continue to work closely with its partners, especially the Climate Change Commission and National Youth Commission so we can prioritize this agreement and try to raise awareness about what can be done collectively and individually to help ensure that it is implemented.

In this regard I would just like to say that you can count on us. The French Embassy here in the Philippines promises to remain faithful to that spirit that has united the Philippines and France on this issue since last year and even before. We will remain friends, close friends that collaborated on this issue with this fight against climate change.

It is a fight which concerns both of our countries and so collectively, we will manage to ensure that the Agreement is implemented and that we move towards a better future.

And lastly I would like to say thank you very much for listening to me today. I hope that this was interesting to you and please be sure that we at the French Embassy are at your disposal for any question or action that you may want us to join or participate in.

Thank you very much.

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Sustainable Agriculture for Food Security

Somehow we neglected the fact that healthy environment is necessary for healthy people. We’ve externalized the environment as if it was something outside us. But food is what connects the earth and our bodies. When we destroy the earth, we are destroying our health. We are destroying our economies.

I witnessed this over the last three (3) decades in my beloved country, India. And you are witnessing it in the Philippines. We share similar histories of small peasant agriculture trying to stay autonomous, sovereign, with an imperial part trying to take our freedom away. Today, of course, the imperial parts are the giant corporations colonizing every culture, every economy, everybody, every organism.

My work on saving seeds began because I believe life is about self- organization and therefore about freedom. The idea of corporations owning life, creating life is just so wrong; and so we create open pollinated community seed banks. In these many years of working with peasants in India, doing ecological agriculture research, we’ve found that the more bio-diversed the agriculture is, which is what small peasants practice, the more health it gives us. My research has also shown that today’s seventy-five percent (75%) of the planet’s destruction is directly related to the way we produce our food through industrial agriculture models and globalized trading systems ensured the world trade organization rules which should never have been accepted by any country because they were written by the giant corporations to maximize their control, maximize their profits. But in the process we have lost 92% of all our vegetable diversity, more than 80% of all our crop diversity. We have lost our soils, their health, and the living organisms. We have depleted water because these systems are very, very irrigation-intensive. And the water that leaves the farm is now contaminated with pesticides and nitrogen. Nitrate contamination is destroying our drinking water. It is destroying life in our water bodies and in the oceans, actually creating dead zones. And that same nitrogen fertilizer, that goes up to the atmosphere contributing to nitrogen oxide which is 300 times more deadly than carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas.

My book, Soil Not Oil, was an exploration of how turning to the soil can help us deal with climate change. Ignoring the soil and pretending that soil’s life can be substituted by chemicals, that illusion has contributed 50% of climate change. Where you have been victims of the cyclone Haiyan, we have been victims of the Orissa Super Cyclone of Nargis, Aila and they keep coming. They’re not going to go away unless we change the way we produce our food.

While destroying the environment, our farmers are being destroyed. India today has the tragic story of 300,000 farmers who committed suicide. In fact, I am in the land which is the capital of suicides in India, Marathwada. This is also the area where the highest acreage is under Bt cotton. Bt cotton is mainly designed for collecting royalties. Its effectiveness in controlling pests has totally failed. Even the government recognizes it. There are court cases going on right now about the super royalties collected for a failed technology between the government of India and the giant company, Monsanto.

Three hundred thousand (300,000) lives sacrificed? So companies can make huge money through toxins which are also destroying our health? More than 75% of all diseases today are called lifestyle diseases. What is honestly should be referred to as food-related diseases because that is the core-competent of what is destroying our competency lifestyles. Whether you look at cancer or you look at diabetes, and explosion on obesity or you look at hypertension and cardiac problems or you look at neurological disorders, the explosion in autism, Alzheimer’s and other diseases related to neurological degeneration, all of them are related to assaulting our bodies, not with nourishment, not with healthy food but with a toxic cocktail that the body cannot handle, synthetic molecules that our body does not know how to deal with. High-fructose corn syrup put into everything – sweetened, not sweet- taken out of corn which is GMO. You fought against the Golden Rice. Such a fake offer to solving the Vitamin A deficiency problem! It is hundreds of times less efficient than the biodiversity you can grow in the Philippines, we are growing in India.

The future is so clearly a choice between two paths. A path which will kill the planet, has already destroyed the planet 75% with 10% more increase in this toxic food supply system. We would have a dead planet! There’s no life in a dead planet! There’s no food in a dead planet! That system is also creating disease. The same companies that sell us the agri-chemicals are selling the pharmaceuticals also patented for them. It is a win-win- win. What is happening right now is health gets destroyed, they sell more drugs, they make more money.

We have another option. That option is the convergence of looking to producing healthy food as the first objective. We just launched a campaign against the import of GMO soya, which has overtaken our diets, to bring back our wonderful oil: seeds of sesame, groundnut, mustard, and coconut and linseed have so much more benefits. The false researches that these companies can buy, talked about our soils having cholesterol! No plant gives cholesterol. Cholesterol build up happens because of the imbalance in the diet.

What we are witnessing is ignorance – lies being sold in the name of science and public relations. That future where we don’t know what we’re eating. We don’t know what it is doing to our bodies. We are not allowed to know what is done to the planet: Fifteen percent (15%) of all greenhouse gases are coming from trashing the planet, for soya expansion in Latin America, palm expansion in East Asia. All of it is unnecessary because our small farms could produce better, healthier food. That’s the choice we must make through the true green convergence. On our small farms which are more productive, which produce more nutrition per acre, more health per acre, which give our farmers more wealth per acre, ten times more is what we witnessed with farmers when they have their own seeds, who don’t use chemical inputs and who practice fair trade and just trade. We have to build sustainable economies which are the only kind of economies that can sustain us.

Gandhi gave us three words that should be our direction for creating sustainable and green economies. He talked about Swadeshi which means both local living economies as well as making ourselves. We’ve got to start making our seeds again. We’ve got to start growing our food again. We’ve got to start processing and cooking our food. We’ve got to start taking control of the economy. Swadesh, self-organization – the nature of life that is self-organization, everything living- is intelligent. Everything living is self- organized and every living economy we build has to be a self-organized community, a self- organized solidarity economy, generating more wealth, circulating more wealth so there is no poverty.

In addition, he gave us the word Satyagraha, the force of truth. I have practiced it since this bombardment of toxic foods started in India. It means the willingness and courage to say no to unjust laws, to injustice, and to lies and untruth, flawed force. With our power, with our non-violent power, we can unleash our energies to change the system.

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Urban Gardening & Solid Waste Management

There were basically two (2) topics discussed in this session, ecological solid waste management (ESWM), a very popular and practical topic, and urban gardening (UG).

Speakers in the session explained how urban gardening is related to ESWM, food security and climate change mitigation. As an added value to the discussion, they also shared the psychological impact of solid waste management and urban gardening to people.
They highlighted the benefits gained from the practice of urban gardening and ESWM such as:

• Urban gardening (UG) produces healthy food while protecting the environment in an urban area.
• UG produces healthy soil while growing healthy crops.
• UG can contribute to carbon sequestration thus help fight global warming.
• UG promotes ecological solid waste management.
• Ecological solid waste management and urban gardening provide for a healthy environment.

They likewise encouraged the participants to learn lessons from nature; to respect life in all its forms; and to instill the values of nurturing, caring, giving and sharing. Health is wealth and wealth is health, therefore, let us heal the soil and heal our soul. Create heaven and earth through ESWM and urban gardening.

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Running an Organic Restaurant

The Coconut House is not just an organic restaurant but a social enterprise managed by the Philippine Coconut Society whose advocacy is for the welfare of the coconut farmers through the development and production of different healthy products that can be derived from coconuts. Being a social enterprise, the restaurant is not profit- oriented but is more on empowering the farmers by maximizing their gains. As a means of promoting the products, Coconut House Restaurant, located at the Quezon Memorial Circle in Quezon City, serves 1001 traditional and old recipes of coconut cuisine. There are health benefits that one can get from the different coconut foodstuffs aside from the ecological value of coconut farming.

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Contact Growing: The Promise of Cocoa

The great demand for organically grown and processed cacao provides opportunities for cacao farmers, processors and traders. Their organization is helping capacitate the farmers by providing them support and training on organic cacao farming and processing. Aside from the health benefits that can be derived from cacao products, there are ecological gains from organic cacao farming.

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Benefits of Raw Food

Raw food, being 100% natural and minimally processed is rich in dietary fiber, life- giving enzymes, minerals, water and vitamins. It therefore is healthier, and promotes long life. When heated to more than about 43˚C/118˚F, foods lose more than 85% of their enzymes which our body needs. Below are some considerations in raw vegan food preparation:

1. Choose local and organic. Since there is no cooking involved, buy organic fruits and vegetables. Buying local produce is supporting local farmers and reducing your carbon footprint.

2. Remember the acid/alkaline balance. An acidic body is less able to absorb the nutrients from the food and is more susceptible to diseases. For a healthier body, choose more alkaline food such as fruits, green vegetables, peas, beans, lentils, spices, herbs, seasoning, seeds and nuts – mostly food that may be eaten raw, and less acid-forming food such as meat, fish, poultry, eggs, grains, and legumes.

3. Consider the sugar content. Eating raw vegan does not always mean you are eating well and healthy. Think of glycemic index (GI) which measures how quickly the blood sugar rise after eating food. The lower the GI, the better it is for the body.

4. Consider juicing. When using nuts, remember to soak them first. Nuts have enzymes inhibitors, which makes it harder for you to digest which defeats the purpose of eating raw.

5. Consider sprouting your nuts and seeds. Other than giving new flavor to your dishes, this makes it easier for your body to digest.

6. Think fermented foods and the benefits of probiotics.

7. Think of proper food combination more than the taste. In raw food, we can get a hint of most if not all of the tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.

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