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FEATURE | DEVCOM

PAIS: Hope of the Farmers

Written by Mdpn. Anjo D. Tuboc Photos by Mdpn. Jayland E. Singuillo and Mr. June Famur Jr.

It was dark that morning. Huge bamboo baskets with eggplants are made ready in the truck. After that, together with a companion, they wear a piece of face mask and a face shield as protection for a long day ahead. Then they hit the road.

Mang Juan was a local farmer in their small barangay. He has an eggplant plantation, which serves as his source of livelihood. That morning, Mang Juan looks forward to earning a much higher income than his previous one. With the sun setting in the east, Mang Juan retraces the road where he came. However, you can see a frowny look drawn on Mang Juan’s face. It turned out that he hardly sold anything for today’s harvest, even to regain his profit due to the sluggish demands as a result of Covid-19. Mang Juan is one of the numerous farmers in the Philippines that was greatly affected by the pandemic. Ever since it started to spread, the COVID-19 posed a threat to human health. Necessary countermeasures to the virus, such as quarantines and other protocols, have remained in place for many months, and no one is certain when this will end. Various efforts to control the virus, such as limiting human movement has inevitably caused economic shocks and social costs that affected the functioning of agricultural and food systems in the country. To address the agricultural issues faced by the local farmers like Mang Juan, the Provincial Government of Iloilo has introduced a digital program to help revive the local economy and assist its local farmers amidst the effects of the pandemic. Led by Iloilo Governor Arthur R. Defensor Jr., they launched the Provincial Agri-fishery Information System (PAIS) as one of their digital programs for the provincewide institutionalization of their agricultural information system. Before that, Representative Lorenz Defensor and her other committee members, early this year, filed House Bill No. 6721, an act that aims to initiate an Agricultural

Information System (AIS) in all cities and municipalities nationwide. The provincial government intends to support the local farmers to market their agricultural products through the aid of this digital-based application, which was conceptualized developed by the Mina municipal government.

What is the Provincial Agri-fishery Information System (PAIS), and how it works? PAIS is a computer-based system that gathers agriproduction data from the local farmers at the barangay level and then consolidates the obtained data to the municipal and provincial levels, respectively. By doing so, they can identify the actual data of the degree of production of the products or commodities produced in the province. Furthermore, through the consolidation of the existing systems present in the Department of Agriculture, the AIS can integrate agricultural data obtained from the various sources in the province into a database to identify stakeholders in the value chain and build a connection with them. By doing so, the system can formulate solutions to resolve various marketing problems faced by the local farmers during the peak of the harvest season and result in greater productivity of the commodities regardless of the quarantine measures imposed by the government during the pandemic.

How can other LGU’s avail of this program?

The Iloilo Governor requests for the support of other municipal government and LGUs to adopt this agricultural system. Other LGUs and municipalities can gain access to the database by paying an amount of 20,000 pesos. It was dark that morning. Huge bamboo baskets with eggplants are made ready in the truck. After that, together with a companion, they wear a piece of face mask and a face shield as protection for a long day ahead. Then they hit the road. A new day came for Mang Juan, but there is already a smile on his face knowing that the future is bright for local farmers like him as the world enters the new normal transition brought by this pandemic.

COVID-19 Impacts to Food Security and Nutrition

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a serious global economic downturn. Slowdowns and downturns result in job and income losses and other disruptions that often lead to increased food insecurity for vulnerable groups such as women, migrant and informal workers, youth, children and people with disabilities (PWD). The SOFI 2020 highlighted the unaffordability of healthy diets to millions and declining incomes will exacerbate the problem making food, particularly nutritious food needed for a healthy diet, less affordable for many more, especially the poor. Disruptions to and possible breakdowns of marketing, logistics and trading systems as well as shortage of labour to support agricultural production could make food unavailable in some locations at some times. Hunger and malnutrition are likely to rise. FAO projects the number of undernourished people to rise globally to between 83 million and 132 million in 2020 depending on the economic growth scenario, and citing an estimated increase of 14.3 percent or an additional 6.7 million children suffering acute malnutrition due to the pandemic.

Source: https://www.ifad.org/en/web/latest/speech/asset/42117818