Good News Pilipinas
Bohol launches Communal Garden Project as sustainable food source
Bohol has launched its Communal Garden project as a sustainable food source for communities.
The Bohol Communal Garden (BCG) serves as a complementary economic development intervention to harness rural women’s capability in sustaining communal gardens to achieve community food security.
An agricultural base provides a local food source for the community, while the community provides new markets for farmers through commercial distribution. This will allow rural women to establish their agency and independence by leading their respective communal gardens.
Serving women from five different municipalities in Bohol, the BCG aims to re-engage rural women in entrepreneurship and train them through a series of modules on food sovereignty and security, digital marketing and sales literacy, leadership and management, values formation and gender and development.
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Kihei resident Victor Manzano says the secret to his longevity is an active lifestyle, a good sense of humor and a twice-daily dose of moringa. At 94 years young, Manzano combines his passion for agriculture and healthy living on his USDA-certified organic moringa tree farm in Wailuku. Photo courtesy of Victor Manzano
Whoever coined the phrase “age is just a number” may have had Victor Manzano in mind.
At 94, he has the energy of a man half his age. What’s his secret? An active lifestyle. A good sense of humor. And a twice-daily dose of moringa.
Manzano credits the superfood for his vitality. Before breakfast, he drinks a cup of warm water with a teaspoon of organic moringa leaf powder and a squeeze of lemon. He also takes four moringa capsules every day two in the morning and two in the evening.
For the last 10 years, prior to the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, the main drivers of agricultural growth were the corn (yellow), livestock and poultry sectors. From 2008 to 2018, livestock averaged an annual growth contribution of 13.8 percent to agriculture’s gross value added (GVA), poultry 10.9 percent, and corn 5.6 percent. All three taken together constituted 30.3 percent, or almost a third, of the country’s agricultural GVA.
In contrast, palay (milled rice), the sector that eats up more than 50 percent of the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) yearly budget, contributed on average 19.7 percent annually of agriculture’s GVA for the same period, while fisheries, despite our extensive coastal areas, only 18.5 percent. Tragically, coconut, planted to around 3.6 million hectares of our agricultural land, registered a measly annual average contribution of 4.1 percent during the same decade.