12

Promotion and enhancement of user-centered creativity for designing and innovating technologies appropriate to specificities of contexts for application (including respect for tradition and for scientific advances)

Promotion of popular ownership, control and enjoyment of broadly-applied technologies;

Harmony with Nature as a requirement for acceptable technologies

Respect for intellectual property rights of entire communities

Appropriate balance between 'economies of scale' and 'small is beautiful'

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Environmental Protection
Thru Sustainable Agriculture

By Kamayan Forum Journal

Editorial of the Kamayan Forum Journal, issue no. 13, April 2003

MORE than half our population lives in rural areas, where agriculture is the main activity. More than 11 of our 30 mil-lion hectares of land area are agricultural lands; much of our nearly 16 million hectares officially classified as forest lands are already being used for agriculture too, except for a few million remaining hectares of actual forests. Thus agricultural activities are bound to exert a major influence in the quality of our environment.

The dominant thinking in Philippine agriculture today is based on mechanization, specialization through mono-cropping, and the use of inorganic fertilizers for nutrient management and chemical poisons for pest control. As a system, this may be called “industrial agriculture”, because it uses industrial methods to increase agricultural production.

These industrial methods are a bane to our environment. Chemical use contaminates our foods, our homes, our workplaces and the environment with toxic and other hazardous chemicals, some of which may persist for decades or bio-accumulate in animals and our bodies. They cause poisoning, cancers, developmental disorders, genetic defects and other problems.

Mono-cropping erodes the great biodiversity in varieties and species that have supported us for thousands of years and our fellow animals for millions of years. Single crops can support only those species which can feed on them, leaving the rest perpetually short on food and threatening them with extinction. Mono-cropping also sets the ground for mechanization.

We are not against mechanization per se. But today’s mechanization relies on a non-renewable resource for fuel, whose extraction itself is a cause of major environmental damage. It also encourages further mono-cropping, in a mutually reinforcing interaction that leads to ecological wastelands. The use of mechanized power to convert habitats and ecosystems into farms is creating the greatest tragedy of this epoch, a wave of species extinctions whose scale of destruction equals one which occurred 65 million years ago.

Clearly, to protect our environment and ourselves, industrial agriculture must be replaced with a more ecologically benign approach.

Such an alternative exists. It is called sustainable agriculture. It is the framework that guides the work of an increasing number of farmers.

It nourishes crops through compost and healthy soil organisms rather than inorganic fertilizers. It recognizes the role of “pests” in the overall ecology of the farm, and relies on a variety of biological, ecological and cultural methods to balance the population of crops, friendly insects and pests in stead of eliminating the latter. It pushes for diversification, to make the farm much more resilient, ecologically and economically too. It reduces hard labor in the farm not through fossil fuel-based mechanization but through an ecological integration which treats the entire farm as an organic whole.

If we want a healthy environment, we should go for sustainable agriculture.

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