The government is fast-tracking its organic agriculture program in keeping with its central goal to not only make farming more profitable for rural stakeholders but also promote environmental health and guarantee the sustainability of the country’s land resources, according to Secretary Arthur Yap of the Department of Agriculture (DA).

Yap said this eco-friendly objective is anchored on three imperatives: the long-term management of the country’s soil and water resources; considering the welfare and limited productive resources of those we seek to empower to make agricultural progress a means to food security and poverty reduction, and; “mastering the land we cultivate without destroying its productive capacity and benchmarking progress against the best in the world to make agriculture a tool of economic competition.”

In a speech read for him by Undersecretary for Special Concerns Berna Romulo Puyat during the recent 5th Eco-Products International Fair (EPIF), Yap expressed concern over the reckless use of the country’s natural resources and overdependence on chemical-based pesticides and fertilizers that have had harmful, and possibly permanent, effects on the environment.

“In many parts of the country, in fact, the soil is by now so degraded that it has become virtually impossible to grow food without costly farm inputs,” Yap lamented. “If we are to continue on this course, then we will soon be remembered as the generation that left behind a bare cupboard for its children.”

The event was attended by former First Lady and EPIF 2009 chairperson Amelita “Ming” Ramos, Development Academy of the Philippines president Antonio Kalaw; University of the Philippines Los Baños Chancellor Dr. Luis Rey Velasco; former Sen. Helena Benitez, who is chairperson emeritus of the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement, and; Horacio “Boy” Morales, president of the La Liga Policy Institute.

Yap said that because the government’s sustainable food production policies integrate three main objectives—environmental health, economic profitability, and social and economic equity—the DA has put its organic agriculture program in its list of priority programs.

Organic farming, which seeks to wean away farmers from the use of chemical inputs, will help pare farm production costs amid the fluctuating costs of petroleum-based fertilizers, which have increased by about 300 percent over the last five years before returning to their normal price levels in the last quarter of 2008, he added.