By Manny Piñol
On the way to an appointment in Ortigas, Mandaluyong from the airport in Pasay City last week, the driver of the Dept. of Agriculture (DA) vehicle I was using decided to take the side streets to avoid the traffic jam on EDSA.
Somewhere in Mandaluyong, I saw a squatter’s shanty which was just bigger than a bird house standing on a vacant space in the sidewalk.
What caught my attention was that beside the shanty was a small garden planted with pechay, ampalaya and luyang dilaw among other things.
That sight left me asking myself: How many vacant sidewalks are there in Metro Manila which could be planted by these informal settlers (a cosmeticized euphemism for squatters) with vegetables?
Before I left for Dubai and Peru last week, I met with the officials of the Agricultural Training Institute (ATI), formerly the Bureau of Agricultural Extension (BAEx), and instructed them to conduct a survey of how much vacant spaces are there in the different parts of the big cities.
I told them that ATI should teach these informal settlers how to plant vegetables in every available space, with the permission of the city governments, of course.
Knowing that most of these informal settlers have virtually nothing in their pockets to buy food, the Garden in the Sidewalk program could provide them not only food but also extra money, as well.
Actually, Garden in the Sidewalk is just a variation of the Urban Gardening program introduced by the Dept. of Agriculture under the previous administration.
Urban Gardening is a beautiful innovation in food production especially so since with the increase in the value of the US dollar in relation to the Peso would inevitably make imported items more expensive.
However, just like other programs of government before, Urban Gardening was not really sustained thus after its launching, the excited participants were just left on their own.
Under the Garden in the Sidewalk Program and the Gulay sa Likod Bahay Program which will be launched when I get back from Peru next week, the DA through the ATI and the Bureau of Plant Industry will extend greater support to the informal settlers, including other urban families who would like to participate in the program.
In the concept that I suggested to ATI last week, technicians from both the ATI and BPI would link up with the prospective participants in the areas and conduct simple training.
The DA will provide them with the basic tools like hoes, spades, shovels and plastic sprinklers and then supply them with compost materials produced by a group supported by Sen. Cynthia Villar.
When available, DA will also provide them with organic fertilisers and vermicompost to further enrich the soil in their gardens.
The peat soil gathered by Maguindanao farmers in the vast Liguasan Marsh under a program initiated by President Rody Duterte could also be used later.
In the long term, the DA will provide these participants with ready to plant vegetable seedlings using the same technology and technique in modern US agriculture when plantlets, instead of seeds, are supplied.
Anything in excess of what the informal settlers families could consume, the DA through its offices would link up with socially-committed stores like Rustan’s to help market the vegetables.
Hopefully, this would prove to be a big help to the informal settlers in the big cities and ensure available supply of vegetables in the market at lesser transport cost.
And this is coming to fruition as a result of a decision to avoid a traffic jam.
It proves true once again the saying: Every crisis (as in traffic jams) opens up windows of opportunities (as in Garden in the Sidewalk).
(Photos of Davao City urban gardens and a Metro Manila school urban garden downloaded from urbangardens.com and Philstar.com)
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