The Compliance of Aeta Indigenous People with EU standards for a Non-chemical or Toxic Environment
Shay Cullen
Preda Foundation
The most important thing for an area to be certified organic is that there is no evidence of any chemical, fertilizer, pesticide or flower inducer found in the area. The goal of the organic movement is to preserve the planet wherever and whenever possible from chemical contamination. The Aeta-Preda project for organic mangos has done this to a large area of the Zambales –Bataan mountain range, the ancestral domain of the Aeta indigenous people. We as Preda see the region where the Aeta live and where they do their tiny farming as a really low-risk area. Their remote village communities, their financial situation, their wide-spread illiteracy, their little non-knowledge of chemicals and their traditionally harvested gardens should be in mind when rating the risk in a way which reflects the special situation of the Aeta communities in a suitable way.
The Preda Fair Trade mangoes-producing mountain area with the 446 Aeta subsistence farmers in the organic mango association stretches over 50 kilometers from Cabangan in the north to Batiawan in the East and to Bayanbayanan in the south in Bataan province. To the west is the West Philippine Sea. While the Aeta tribal people are indigenous subsistence farmers in remote locations, they have scattered fruit and vegetable and root crops in the mountains as their survival. They eat what they grow.
The Aeta are the direct descendants of the original native indigenous people of the Philippines who first inhabited the islands then covered with lush rain forests and was home to many wild animals, birds reptiles, flowers, plants and fauna. They have lived as hunters and gatherers in the Zambales mountain range and other parts of the Philippines for as long as 30,000 years. They are the aboriginal inhabitants of these Islands.
The people live in poor conditions most of them without any formal education and many without basic skills of reading or writing. Many of the older people and subsistence farmers are Illiterate. However, the Preda project support as many as 50 Aeta youth in school to the college level. Elementary schools have been established in some of the bigger villages. The culture of the people is based on their reverence and respect of nature and they are animists. There has been some inter-marriage with lowlanders.
Most of them do not speak or completely understand Tagalog as they speak their own language. They survive by planting vegetables and root crops such as sweet potato, cassava and in some flat areas rice and do so without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. They are much too poor to be able to afford the costly chemicals.
They have various fruit trees like avocado, jackfruit, banana, and mango of various varieties such as pico, indian, and carabao. The Aeta people have in the past had little income from their low valued fruit and small natural harvests. The mango trees do not naturally blossom every year. It was uneconomical to even harvest the mangos until Preda Fair Trade came in and offered to buy at a high price and taught the people to meet organic standards.
The Aeta indigenous people responded as best they could to learn the EU bureaucratic rules and regulations of organic certification designed for the developed nations. They and the trained local inspectors were unaccustomed to have a filing system for the extensive documents, inspection reports and receipts of mangos sold. They live in bamboo grass thatched huts in typhoon-prone areas where their native houses are blown down annually and then rebuilt.
Despite the lack of language skills and literacy skills to meet the requirements and standards of the EU and of the rich developed countries as demanded by the certification bodies, they left their crops and work in mountain areas and travelled many kilometers on foot there being no roads to the higher mountain areas to attend the organic training meetings. Not all 446 Aeta could attend every organic training meeting as demanded by the strict rules. One failed to have sufficient organic training in the rules perhaps due to language difficulties.
The Aeta are naturally intelligent, environmentally aware and have devised various methods of natural farming to survive with their families. Not having access to an office environment or calculators, they keep accounts of the number of trees, the kilos harvested and delivered for example by tying small knots on a string. Primitive but it works under adverse circumstances where any paper documents are easily destroyed in torrential rains and typhoons beating down the grass huts. Despite the loss of the rain forests, they have adapted to become subsistence farmers growing what they need to eat and selling any surplus to the local markets. They have to carry their produce in sacks down the mountains or if the community has a carabao and cart they share the use of it. They preserve their culture and their environment and are resilient despite the hardship of simple subsistence living and the encroachment of outsiders out to exploit them and their natural ancestral domain.
Their survival against the elements and human intrusion is extraordinary as they do not have government assisted medical facilities or clinics or even rural doctors. They have their own medicinal plant tradition, which they use to very good and positive effect that helped them survive for 30,000 years.
That was until the colonial invasion by the Spanish and then the North American colonial powers that brought western diseases and reduced the Aeta population greatly as they had no immunity to such diseases. The Aeta then faced an ecological disaster as the massive deforestation and logging operations of their ancestral forests began under the newly independent nation in 1945 .The Philippine government officials from the ruling family dynasties backed by the Philippine military grew vastly wealthy and the Aeta were driven into greater poverty as the Resistance was futile .The deforestations and traditional life as hunters and gatherers ended with the loss of their rain forests. Wild cogon grass covers much of the once beautiful forested mountains that were logged out. The destruction of the rain forests of the Philippines was pursued with a insatiable greed of the rich and their multinational partners and cronies on an industrial scale from 1945 to 2006 to rebuild devastated Manila, Japan and Europe after WWII and continues today on a lower scale.
The Aetas are a gentle, peace-loving people and offered no resistance to the invaders but retreated further into their disappearing rain forests higher up the mountains where they sought refuge. With the forest gone, they turned to subsistence farming growing fruit and vegetables and kept chickens and some pigs. They live in small bamboo huts with grass thatched roofs called “kubo”, vulnerable to the many typhoons that sweep across the Philippines 25 times or more every year. They have no electricity, no roads, no direct water supply or proper sanitation. They have very few carabaos domesticated as farming animals.
Today their ancestral lands and farming communities are under threat from mining corporations. Mining prospectors and engineers-surveyors come to mark out the land for confiscation and distribution to mining companies by corrupt government officials. The intruders have heavily armed military escorts that can intimidate the Aeta indigenous people and shoot them if they resist.
The Organic Inspection
Over the 50 kilometer area, the three female inspectors of the OCCP visited randomly three hillside areas with difficulty as they are more office-bound employees of the Manila-based Philippine certification company. The inspectors are not accustomed to hike in the hills. They inspected three nearest mango groves and based their report on two field visits. We received the list of non-compliance which is mostly about the bureaucratic rules of how many attended meetings, the failure of keeping some records and files and receipts and such. But no list of the successful compliance of no chemicals in the area but for one rice farmer who used urea had mango trees near the field. But we did not buy his mangos. Besides in a 50 by 20 kilometers area, that is a small failure.
Their field report focused on the negative and noted the failure of one farmer out of 446 who failed to meet the standards. There was no mention of any positive elements and compliance such as the most important of all which is the absence of any evidence of chemicals. Not all farmers were able to attend all the meetings due to typhoons, long distance, and sickness in the family, their need to gather their food and the long distance across the mountains. We would have wished a more robust and extensive visit to the mango areas so they could verify the clean and non-chemical contaminated environment.
The Aeta have resisted the incursions of the fruit- chemical spraying corporations that offer services to spray flower inducer and pesticide to greatly increase the harvest but the traders would get 2/3 of the harvest. The Aeta have refused these offers of the commercial chemical crop spraying people. If they did, this would double the income of the harvest but would harm the environment.
The Aeta have resisted and refused to allow the commercial crop spraying to enter their domain because of their commitment to organic growing as taught and introduced to them by Preda. It is the Preda Fair Trade who buys their organic certified crop at a higher price than the commercial sprayers would offer.
For the Aeta to loose the organic certification due to super strict EU bureaucratic processes not designed or adapted for tribal areas would be detrimental and harmful to the environment because the bureaucratic nature of the compliance rules is of no benefit to the most impoverished people. These unreasonable bureaucratic rules would leave the Aeta people open to the tempting offers of the commercial sprayers who would contaminate the entire area.
We have done our best under the dire circumstances of the poor living conditions, illiteracy, lack of language skills of the people and the extent of the bureaucratic standards to reach a reasonable standard of compliance and we will continue to make up the non-compliance as outlined in the report.
Shay Cullen
