#TogetherForTamaraws Campaign Launched to Help Tamaraw Rangers and Wardens

Wazzup Pilipinas!

The Philippines and 35 other countries officially launched #TogetherforTamaraws, an online fundraising campaign to help conservation frontliners affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. This campaign is led by the Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) project in the Philippines with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) through its MIMAROPA Regional Office, plus the Biodiversity Management Bureau.

Dedicated rangers and wardens of the Mounts Iglit-Baco Natural Park (MIBNP) and Tamaraw Conservation Programme (TCP) have been conserving the tamaraw – the world’s rarest and most endangered buffalo species – for decades.

Sadly, one of the 24 TCP rangers together with 32 of the 35 Taw’buid Mangyan wardens who patrol the area to deter tamaraw hunters and poachers, have lost their jobs due to the MINBP’s closure following community quarantine measures. The wardens also serve as guides and porters for tourism and research expeditions. Now only 23 TCP rangers and three MIBNP wardens are expected to patrol a core area of 2500 hectares inside the 106,655-hectare MIBNP, which hosts at least 480 of the world’s 600 remaining tamaraw.

The campaign was launched to gift tamaraw frontliners with critically-needed field allowances and food so they can continue protecting tamaraw, plus the other endangered flora and fauna of Mindoro.

“We launched this global campaign because we saw local communities and rangers, the frontliners of conservation, being strongly impacted by the loss of income from tourism,” explains Onno van den Heuvel, BIOFIN global project manager. “Exotic places like the Iglit-Baco mountain range might seem distant to most people, but they must be conserved. Rangers and wardens need and deserve our support to keep doing good conservation work.”

BIOFIN hopes to raise approximately PHP1.149M to help secure allowances and provisions for tamaraw frontliners until the end of the year. Readers can give gifts at any amount online through bit.ly/TogetherforTamaraws.

“When our grandparents were still alive, forests were plentiful and full of wildlife. Over 70% of the country was covered in pristine forest, but only a million hectares are now left,” says Titon Mitra, UNDP Philippines Resident Representative. “We’re losing 200 football fields of forest cover daily and in this fix is the tamaraw, of which only about 600 are left. I hope each of you can make a small contribution. In doing so, you play a big part in securing the livelihoods of our tamaraw wardens and rangers who are doing such an exceptional job in protecting this critically-endangered species.”

Since its inception in 2012, BIOFIN has worked with both the public and private sectors across 36 countries to enhance protection for the world’s top biodiversity hotspots by helping secure funds to implement sound biodiversity programs.

The ranger and wardens who were laid-off are members of the Taw’buid, Iraya and Buid tribes, three of Mindoro’s eight Mangyan tribes. They are enforcers and educators for their fellow tribesfolk about the significance of conserving the tamaraw, a traditionally-hunted but highly-revered animal.

“For years, our rangers have been operating without proper patrol gear and equipment. Salaries are often delayed and no one has health or social security benefits,” explains TCP head Neil Anthony Del Mundo. Both MIBNP and TCP rangers regularly ward off poachers, dismantle spring-loaded balatik and deadly silo snare traps and discourage the park’s indigenous tribesfolk from engaging in destructive slash-and-burn farming.

“This pandemic should bring forth empathy and not drive us to apathy,” says Occidental Mindoro Congresswoman Josephine Ramirez-Sato, who delivered the first tranche of relief gifts to the rangers today. “Let us all help our rangers and wardens in saving the tamaraw. This is the spirit of Bayanihan. Even as we wear masks, stand three feet apart and stay safe in the comfort of our homes, we can and we must do our part. Our contributions will go a long way and will make a difference. Bayanihan is possible amidst one of the greatest challenges of our time. Let’s show our families, our communities and the world that we will be together for the tamaraws!”

Though they need our help, the rangers and wardens have decided to voluntarily continue patrolling despite the dangers. “Lockdown or not, we’ll put our own health on the line to protect our tamaraws,” vows Ed Bata, senior TCP ranger.

Communal Gardening Could Help Solve our Food Crisis in this COVID-19 World

Wazzup Pilipinas!

A survey from the Social Weather Station revealed that 4.2 million Filipinos experienced involuntary hunger under the current lockdowns, doubling hunger rates from the end of 2019. The pandemic is revealing cracks in our system that have always been there but now have upturned our way of life. Our globalized food system is rife with gaps that leave vulnerable sectors of society unaccounted for, leading to disparate yet simultaneous problems of obesity and poverty that have existed since long before the pandemic. Issues of food security have continued to deepen, particularly in urban areas such as the slums of Metro Manila. The United Nations states that we are now barrelling towards a global food emergency - but it isn’t too late for us to change that.

What do we mean when we talk about a globalized food system? We refer to the way our food system is constructed and its interactions both locally and with the larger world beyond the Philippines. Market powers and globalization affect the nature of the food supply chain, thereby altering the quantity, type, cost, and desirability of food available for consumption. Our farmers - their livelihoods and wellbeing - are left to the whims of these larger forces.

Before we can think up remedies to the food crisis, we must first understand what the problem is. One of the important pillars of food security is access to food. Various factors - geographical, societal, political - can keep whole communities from having access to good food. Under the current pandemic, these factors have been exacerbated. The poor have become poorer. The hungry have become hungrier. Those with little access to food, now face even greater rifts in accessibility.

Access to food is the source of much of our food security issues. Therefore, the obvious solution would be to close the gap between communities and the food that they eat.

The solution lies in communal gardening.

A communal garden is a small farm that is run and managed by a community for its own consumption and the consumption of their neighbors. These can be backyard gardens, or small farms in empty lots that are managed by nearby households. They need constant supervision and require working hands, but they’re easy to set up and to manage. But what benefit can a communal garden provide?

Perhaps the most important concept behind communal gardening is the idea of democratic food production. The benefit of growing your own food is that you have the ability to decide what crops to eat, with minimized concern for prices at the market. You have control over your production. Your choice of fruits, vegetables, even chicken, fish, and other livestock, rests in your hands and not in the shelves at the local store or supermarket. You and your community can decide for themselves what to eat.

The second is a very simple idea: the closer you are to the source of your food, the more sure you are that you’ll get to eat it. A communal garden means literally having your food right next door, or in your backyard. With a well-managed garden, you can rest assured that nutritious food is a walk away, and maybe a bit of negotiation with your neighbors. This is a far cry over the hunger and uncertainty felt by many vulnerable communities.

A final, additional benefit to communal gardens is what it means for healthy community life. City life, for the most part, has separated us into individual and familial units, tearing down old community sensibilities in exchange for urban isolation. By working together towards the management of a communal garden, neighbors are made to work together to ensure food security for all. Together a community pools resources, decides what produce to invest in, works out work schedules and roles and responsibilities. Jobs and livelihoods are created while food security increases, and communities come closer together as they work toward their mutual benefit.

It’s important for us to bring farms into our cities and our communities, and doing so promises many benefits - but such a task will require much work on a local level. What can be done to ensure that every city and every barangay has its own green spaces with which the people can grow their own food upon?

Firstly, there needs to be some sort of buy-in, a proverbial foot-in-the-door, to get such green spaces up and running. In our experience, we’ve found that introducing community gardens from an enterprise perspective is particularly effective. By providing the initial seeds and capital, an institution or organization can set the groundwork for a fully-functioning communal garden. The promise of further spending power through earnings from the garden can spur townships to continue managing the space.

Those first few green spaces should then serve as a case study for the rest of the community. The communal garden should showcase highly replicable, low-tech, cost-efficient production technologies, to prove to the community that its management wouldn’t be much of a challenge.

Finally, these community gardens should be built with accessibility in mind. Everyone has the capacity to farm. By designing these communal gardens to be accessible to women, the elderly, youth groups, and PWDs, we can create further employment and increase productivity, while highlighting inspirational figures who could champion the cause of communal gardening.

Through the assistance of an initial buy-in, through effective management and replicable, people-intensive technologies, and with accessibility taken into consideration, each communal garden that is built can serve as its own argument for the feasibility of a democratic food system.

Through communal gardening, we are not only providing solutions for the coming food crisis, but also transforming the very fabric of our community lives. We bring our own sources of food right into our own backyards, for us to grow and manage together with our neighbors, our friends, our families. With others. Creating a communal garden is the single biggest political act a community can do because it challenges a broken global food system and unlocks the potential of our interpersonal lives.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that we have a broken food system that has not been able to fully address the gaps that keep us from achieving food security for all. Distances physical, social and financial keep many from the food that they need to lead nutritious lives. If we were to take production into our own hands, though, and if we were to work together within our communities to build democratic solutions to our nutritional challenges, we may be able to provide safe food for all. The solution to the food crisis is in our own hands.

By WWF-Philippines Sustainable Food Systems Program Manager Moncini Hinay

How BellaVita Embraced Digital Lifestyle Amid The Pandemic

Wazzup Pilipinas!

The real estate industry has taken a hard hit from the COVID-19 outbreak as potential clients become slimmer. Face-to-face meetings that are essential to the business can’t be done; discussing the terms and conditions of the contracts also becomes more complicated without physical interaction.

To continue operations, real estate developers need to compromise. One of the best examples to emulate is BellaVita. They capitalized on their online network and expanded from there to continue reaching out to their clients and potential ones.

This is how BellaVita embraced the digital lifestyle amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

Virtual House Tours

Even without physical interaction, you can still see your dream house, amenities, securities, and neighborhood through the screen. Another great thing is they conduct these virtual house tours in their different locations around the country.

They also upscale their strategy to be fun so clients won’t easily get bored, especially as they only get to peep through the house on their monitors.

Online engagements

To keep in close contact with their clients, they keep improving their engagements online. As this is the most convenient way that clients and developers can meet halfway, they always come with more strategies to maintain engagements as high as possible.

Some of their effective engagements include online raffles, photo contests, photos, infographics, and videos promoting their brand.

Social media shows

In addition to keeping engagements through contests, they also made shows through their social media pages. This way, potential clients can easily interact with them and vice versa. Best of all, they made this fun to ensure better engagement results.

The topics of the shows include relevant to lifestyle and business. They also release precautionary measures and guidelines so you can have a worry-free living amid COVID-19.

Educational promotions

The great thing about BellaVita is they don’t only focus on their brand, but they also on the real estate industry. They want to keep the business afloat, which is why they present educational promotions relevant to the industry.

Aside from posting educational promotions, they also post inspirational messages to keep the spirits high during this trying time.

BellaVita is doing its best so that they can keep their lines and engagements open for their clients. They’re taking a big compromise from what was once an industry that operates face-to-face to something that can work virtually.

Best of all, their houses are located where areas of businesses and developments are on the rise, making them a good choice for your new home.

For more information about the location of their homes and their pricing, visit BellaVita website or Facebook page.