Farmer-Led Resistance: MASIPAG’s Journey to Reclaim Seed Sovereignty

The Dominant Agricultural System in the Philippines is Stacked Against Them — But MASIPAG is Changing the Narrative

The Philippines’ food system was shaped by centuries of colonial rule — first Spanish, then U.S. Colonial powers worked to steadily consolidate land in the hands of a small number of corporations and wealthy landowners. Today, while 75 percent of the country lives in rural areas, where agriculture is the main source of livelihood, nine out of ten farmers do not own the land they till. The Philippines government has promised to address the feudalistic conditions facing the majority of the country since the 1980s; time and again they have broken their promises of genuine agrarian reform and land redistribution and instead shored up power with the support of the wealthy landowning minority. Increasingly, farmers and farmers’ rights advocates who advocate for land and justice are targeted and arrested or killed by the government.

Filipino farmers’ calls for the right to shape their own food systems have gone ignored. Instead, corporations have teamed up with the government to address what they see as “the real problem.” Institutions like the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) introduced what they claimed were “high-yielding,” vitamin fortified varieties of rice during the Green Revolution in the 1960s. Rice is a staple crop across Asia and supports the livelihoods of a majority of rural farmers. These seeds, which were funded by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (who donated around $10.3 million to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) for its development of Vitamin-A-fortified “Golden Rice”), and delivered through government-subsidised packages, were marketed as a means to improve farmers’ yields.

But the new rice varieties came with a host of unintended consequences. Farmers’ health began to suffer from the high levels of chemical fertilisers and pesticides required to grow these modern rice varieties. As the initial subsidised packages ran out, the steep cost of inputs began to push farmers back into a cycle of debt; they began to see decreasing gains in their yields as soils became degraded as a result of the intensive style of…