Storm-weary Farmers in Philippines Suffer Huge Losses

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines — Café by the Ruins, a popular rustic restaurant situated in Baguio City, the Philippines' famed mountain city resort, usually caters to tourists and residents who enjoy sipping their cups of brewed coffee while appreciating the artworks displayed on the café’s stone walls.

These days, however, the quaint café is busy running a soup kitchen—coordinating about a dozen café staff and volunteers in cooking and delivering meals to evacuees whose homes and farms were destroyed by Typhoon ‘Parma’.

A resident walks along the muddied debris of a landslide in La Trinidad in Benguet province near Baguio City north of Manila. (Photo: Getty Images)

Many of these evacuees are farmers whose lands have been ravaged by one of the most devastating typhoons to hit their homes and main source of livelihood in recent years.

Shortly after learning that the evacuees needed food, clothes and medicines, manager Feliz Perez and the co-owners of the café—a group of entrepreneurs, artists and art lovers—turned the café into a temporary relief center, invited volunteers to help, and accepted donations of food, money and blankets for the typhoon's victims.

The café has been delivering between 200 and 300 packed meals daily to evacuees in Baguio and nearby towns in Benguet, a landlocked province in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), home to indigenous tribes collectively called ‘Igorot’.

Perez said the evacuees often request mung beans "because they are more filling," alluding to the fact that most evacuees do not have immediate access to food and thus need to eat something that will keep them full while waiting for the next delivery of relief goods.

CAR encompasses most of the areas within the Cordillera Central mountain range of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines. Blessed with fertile soil and cool weather, farming is one of the region's key industries.

The farm folk of Cordillera supply vegetables and mountain-grown rice and coffee to both local and international markets.

But the back-to-back typhoons—‘Ketsana’ and ‘Parma’—that swept through the country in late September and early October changed the fortunes not only of the Cordillera but other key food-producing provinces of Luzon.

One of these is Nueva Ecija, in Central Luzon, the rice granary of the Philippines. Lito Tambalo feels lucky enough that the floods did not destroy the one-hectare farmland that his family had been tilling for decades. However, Parma damaged most of his rice crop.

"I'm supposed to thresh the rice that I just harvested, but I wasn't able to dry the grain because of the rains," said the 40-year-old farmer. He added that he was forced to sell his rice at a price hardly enough to recover his capital.

Even if the typhoons have left the country, Tambalo will not be able to plant because most irrigation facilities have been damaged. Besides, he said, the rains might just damage his harvest, which makes him hesitant to spend for another cropping season — assuming he even has money to spare.

Philippine agriculture officials said the agriculture sector suffered the most from the two cyclones. They placed the total damage to agriculture and fisheries wrought by the two typhoons at 18.5 billion pesos (397.65 million U.S dollars). The amount covers lost crops, fish and livestock, the damaged irrigation facilities and 200,000 hectares of submerged land.

The impact of the two typhoons on Luzon was so huge that it forced Philippine agriculture secretary Arthur Yap to downscale the country’s farm growth rate to between 0.5 and 1.5 percent from the previous target of three percent. Luzon accounts for roughly 50 percent of the country's total farm output.

The worse part is that hunger and poverty now persist in what is supposed to be the country's food basket. The once abundant farmlands — now heavily damaged — may no longer be rehabilitated, depriving farmers of their main source of food and livelihood.