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The PBB 401 rice variety stands out because it has repeatedly shown its resilience to floods, including those induced by extreme weather events. HINIGARAN, Negros Occidental — A farmer-bred rice variety never leaves farmers from barangay Calapi in Hinigaran town in the mid-southern part of this province empty-handed.
“With PBB 401 variety, there’s always something to harvest,” said Ruben Laquita, a member of a small peasant group in Hinigaran.
Farms in this coastal town are frequently flooded following heavy rains, which Laquita described as an unfortunate experience in the last three cropping seasons. “We used to plant other rice varieties [through organic farming], but floods completely destroyed them.”
The PBB 401 rice variety, on the other hand, stands out because it has repeatedly demonstrated its resilience to floods. Extreme weather events, also known as conditions beyond average weather and climate patterns, have become more common because of climate change.
Over the last two decades, the country has had the highest occurrence of extreme weather events, particularly tropical typhoons, among Asian developing countries included in this study, with flooding being one of the major agricultural damage-causing hazards. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, these unmitigated disasters have cost the agriculture sector the most, with 63 percent damage or P290 billion pesos recorded from 2010 to 2019, further impoverishing the poorest members of this already vulnerable sector, the majority of whom significantly contribute in their local economies’ food production as a big part of the rural population.
As a result, farmers like Laquita prefer the PBB 401 because preventing total production losses is “better than nothing.”
What is PBB 401?
PBB 401 is an organic white rice variety developed by the late Pepito Babasa, a farmer-breeder from Camarines Sur in the Bicol region. Babasa used two parent materials for breeding: native red rice Bulao and salinity-resistant M115-1. This resulted in a slightly “blonde” husk, droopy flag leaf, and a not-too-slender/elongated grain that ripens before the leaves. It can reach a height of one meter.
“Here in our place [in Bato town] there’s no irrigation system. Upland farms are rainfed, and farmers can only plant once per year. Those in the lowlands pumped water from the river, which can also flood their rice lands during heavy rains,” Babasa said.
According to him, the PBB 401 is drought-resistant due to its deep-penetrating roots, and farmers in other Philippine provinces such as Negros and Cotabato in Mindanao, where irrigation is also scarce, attest to its productivity amid extreme drought, even without using chemical fertilizer.
But while the PBB 401 was made as drought-resilient, its adaptors also found it flood-resistant, including the Hinigaran farmers. Their most recent experience was when super typhoon Odette (Rai), the strongest typhoon to hit the country in 2021 and the first to develop strength beyond tropical storms in December since typhoon Nina in 2016, flooded their communal farm. It is also the second most damaging after super typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in 2013, which a study published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology estimated to have a return period of 13 years for affected rice farmers, adding 12.5 million tons of rice have been lost to typhoons since 2001.
Despite the severe flood, the Hinigaran farmers were still able to harvest 35 cavans of rice, compared to their normal harvest of 95 to 100 cavans, while the Rc10 variety was completely destroyed.
In a phone interview, Ronald Labrador, who obtained a salinity-resilient PBB variety called 410 for a coastal communal farm that he used to manage in Albay province, said these varieties are highly adaptable. According to him, the communal farm was established in response to saltwater inundation of rice lands, an environmental hazard that has become more common with the rapid climate-induced sea-level rise.
Moreover, Babasa said his farm is along Lake Bato, one of the largest in the country, and is part of the lake system in Camarines Sur. It overflowed after heavy rains, causing flooding that could last two weeks.
Core challenge: land rights
Peasants are benefiting from the PBB 401 rice variety thanks to trial farming, which would have been difficult without access to land. Farmers can test rice varieties before planting them on their own farms by using communal lands as trial farms.
According to Premediles, they usually grow a variety of rice seeds per gram and spread them on a small area of the rice bed that can hold at least 50 pieces of seeds. When those begin to grow, they observe and document how they perform, whether they are healthy or if they have any defects.
Landless farmers, instead, grow what their landlords prefer, which is often inorganic crops, because the government prioritizes them for subsidies. That is the same reason why smallholder farming families continue to practice chemical farming despite knowing its economic impact on them and its environmental tolls.
In 2022, the government’s budget allocation for fertilizer and oil price hike subsidies amounted to P20 billion pesos. Farmers qualified for such subsidies are those that receive chemical-dependent, high-yielding rice seeds from the government and those registered in the Registry System for Basic Sectors in Agriculture (RSBSA), which, according to the Department of Agriculture, “contains basic information of legitimate farmers, farm laborers, and fishers.”
Because of this, as well as the lack of support for farmers to organize, including CARP beneficiaries, Premediles laments how, despite the PBB variety’s success in reducing losses from extreme weather events, it is not widely used by Filipino farmers.
Trial farming is a systematic activity that people’s organizations mobilize on the ground. Its members voluntarily participate in organic farming training provided by MASIPAG, attend regular meetings in their localities for the exchange of agricultural knowledge, and are willing to provide MASIPAG with a copy of their bred seeds, which will be distributed for free to its trial farms nationwide.
According to Premidiles, “aside from simply granting them land, it would be preferable if the government would assist new beneficiaries in better managing their lands.”
This is one of the reasons the CARP and its various iterations have failed to deliver on their promise of closing the gap between landless farmers and land ownership, despite having reportedly distributed 4.9 million hectares (out of 5.4 million hectares designated for CARP) since 2005. CARP beneficiaries struggle to keep their lands because farming is a capital-intensive and high-risk endeavor, especially inorganic farming, and many farmers end up giving up because of debt. In other cases, they suffered from and struggled against intimidation and harassment.
While the CADASFA farmers had a smooth turnover and have no issue of land grabbing on their end, others are not as fortunate. The former is currently holding individual lands as well as eighty-five square meters of communal land, which includes the trial land.
Nancy Vingno, a peasant farmer from KABUHIAN Association in Kabankalan, said it took years to process their certificate of land ownership award (CLOA). “Having it for 24 years now is also 24 years of never-ending struggle against land grabbing and constant harassment by landlords and the military when we simply would like to focus on farming and to be able to farm in peace,” she said.
This is also happening in other parts of the country where land disputes have resulted in human rights violations of farmers, indigenous groups, and environmental defenders. In June this year, members of the Philippine National Police illegally and violently arrested agrarian reform beneficiaries in Tarlac for rightfully claiming their land rights in favor of a local politician claiming ownership of the land.
Other challenges
Furthermore, there are no monetary funds to invest in the trial farms, which are managed locally and must be organized to obtain funding through donations or grants. Because their seed libraries are housed in simple huts, they are vulnerable to typhoons, as was the case in Kabankalan.
Prior to typhoon Odette, farmers from Negros provided seed to typhoon-affected MASIPAG farmers, while those from Albay held feeding activities for farming families who were affected by movement restrictions during the lockdown.
Still, the available seeds are limited, so CADASFA farmers had to make do with a non-flood-resistant RC10. “We’d like to have a more consistent operation of the trial farm on our communal land, but it’s currently empty because we don’t have the money to maintain it,” Laquita said.
Developing locally adapted rice varieties like the PBB 401 also takes years, and some members may become inactive during the process due to a lack of adequate support. This is happening now with some CADASFA members.
“Sometimes it is not just about the money but also about other resources. Owning our own land gives us control over our time and food production, and receiving the necessary support for land improvement activities and management constitutes true agrarian reform,” said Cutie Dalumpines, PDG coordinator for CADASFA. (JJE, RVO).
Source:
Online/GFMM
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