Among the many challenges confronting Dumaguete (traffic congestion, garbage, unemployment, and burgeoning pressures on the City to provide social services and infrastructure), food shortage is the most terrifying of them all.
The City is home to some 131,377 inhabitants (PopCen 2015), making it the most crowded in the Province.
For 2016 alone, the City Tourism Office reported that the City hosted 500,000 tourists. This signifies that approximately 1,400 tourists each day compounded to the current City population of over 131,000 people.
With the City’s vision of making Dumaguete a “Center of Quality Education”, a Tourist Destination, and a Business Center, an increase in human population is highly- anticipated.
With this kind of populace, 30 hectares of land geared towards rice production and 275 hectares for corn production are not adequate to meet the food requirements of the City’s escalating number of residents.
Even for vegetables, meat and fish products — we are not self-sufficient.
However, these are solvable issues. The biggest challenge is how we can meet the food consumption requirements of people since a lot of agricultural lands are now being lost due to non-farm uses.
As more land is lost, it will become more difficult for us to produce the amount of food needed to feed the human population that is continuously on the rise. But as the cliché goes, if there’s a will….
At the Comprehensive Development Plan/Executive-Legislative Agenda Formulation Workshop held Dec. 15 to 17 in San Fernando, Cebu, I presented the major issues in the City agriculture sector, simultaneously proposing programs, projects and activities to address the concerns.
The most prominent issues: 1) diminishing agricultural lands due to non-farm use conversion; 2) low agricultural productivity due to lack of production inputs, facilities and farm machineries; and 3) aging farmers and agricultural technicians.
To arrest the City’s amplified food shortage, and work to achieve food sustainability, I proposed the following measures: 1) Establish a Bagsakan Center; 2) Organize a Livestock Auction Market (for affordable prices, bypassing the middlemen); 3) Give scholarships for 4H Club members (towards a degree in Agriculture); 4) Provide water supply facilities (e.g. hose/pipes or pipe irrigation);5) Develop idle lots; 6) Produce crops in Poblacion barangays through containerized gardening (urban agriculture); 7) Lobby for amendment of CRM Ordinance to penalize purse seiners fishing within the territorial jurisdiction; 8) Establish Community Fish Landing Center; 9) Provide sufficient farm inputs, machineries, and facilities for rice, corn, vegetables (tractors, floating tillers, rice threshers, power sprayers, certified seeds, organic fertilizers); 10) Provide post-harvest facilities (solar bubble dryers, rice and corn mills); 11) Provide good quality Bantay Dagat patrol boats for coastal law enforcement activities; 12) Increase incentives for Bantay-Dagat enforcers
The measures are some of the moves I think will help us solve the problem on food scarcity. Specifically, for the Bagsakan and the Livestock Auction Market to work, the City needs to network with the Province and the different municipalities and cities to bring their crops and livestock products to these two venues.
The City should provide space and build the facilities for this purpose, and work jointly with Department of Agriculture for logistical and technical support. With these maneuvers, we can be sure of adequate sources of safe and low-priced farm products as these will enable the slashing of trading layers that result in incredibly-high prices of farm products.
Conducting mid-year and annual performance reviews, as well as operational planning have been our way of life at the Office of the City Agriculturist since 2008.
Because of this good practice of review and planning processes, Dumaguete consistently comes out as one of the top achievers in the annual conduct of the Regional Gawad Saka search for outstanding farmers and rural-based organizations.
The City Agriculturist’s Office is humbled and honored to have received a total of 15 regional awards since I assumed as City agriculturist in 2008, even when I was functioning as City Administrator at the same time during the administrations of the late Mayor Agustin Perdices and former Mayor Manuel Sagarbarria until June 30, 2016.
In the latest review conducted by the OCA, we realized that the office over- achieved its targets by more than a hundred percent, particularly on the Indigenous Productivity Enhancer, the Organic Fertilizer Production, the Plow Now-Pay Later program, Gulayan at Palaisdaan alay sa Kabataan (GPAK), the High-Value Crops Development Program, Livestock Breeding and Dispersal, Inland & Marine Fisheries Management, and Research & Development.
While these achievements are emotionally-gratifying, they don’t make us sit on our laurels; instead, these recognitions only serve to inspire us — including the Dumaguete residents — to work even harder in attaining our goal of feeding everyone in this Gentle City.
The challenge of combating food shortage is a colossal task involving titanic proportions of political will from public officials, and a massive amount of compassion and public participation from all who love Dumaguete.
The task ahead is not easy but is definitely doable. Cheers to a progressive new year!
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Author’s email: wea_129@yahoo.com
