Smooth Escape: Buhid farming

I've been working with the Buhid for more than seven years, assisting them from the preparation of the documents required for their ancestral domain title application, to the formulation of their plans for the protection and management of this communal territory.

The Buhid are among the seven indigenous groups in the island of Mindoro. Their ancestral domain covers the south-central part, occupying both the provinces of Occidental and Oriental Mindoro. The total land area of their ancestral domain is 99 thousand hectares with about 18,000 Buhid people living within the territory.

Mayang Caring in her farm

This farm is owned by the Caring family. True to their surname, this family is my home and indeed the one that cares for me when I am in Batangan, the tribal barangay which is the seat of Sadik Habanan Buhid, the first and oldest recognised Buhid IP organisation in Oriental Mindoro. I frequent Batangan as this is the regular venue for Buhid assembly meetings.

Hagnay, the father and who carries the Caring surname, is a Hanunuo who married Mayang, a Buhid. They live in Batangan and tills a nearby farm apart from the farm they have in Nawa, which is an adjacent community of Batangan.

The Caring family cultivates maize or corn, sweet potatoes, cassava and other rootcrops. They also have papaya, kaong, durian, coconut, and kadyos (pigeon pea). They also raise free-range chicken around the farm.

During my visit this March, they have just cleared the farm for planting. We harvested kadyos and had buko or young coconut the juice of which tasted deliciously sweet. We had the kadyos for lunch boiled only with water and salt but tasted really good. The kadyos is an important food in the Caring household. They usually pair it with steaming rice. Rice bought from outside has become a staple food in the Caring household since cash crops (like maize) have been regularly produced. The farm cannot go without the rootcrops however, as these are still the more dependable food around when cash is short.

The farm is what the Buhid calls kaingin. The Buhid uses shifting cultivation, where the farm is cultivated, harvested, left for a certain time and then cleared by burning to start the cropping season anew. Traditionally, the Buhid, like many indigenous peoples across the world, leave a fallow period to let the nutrients go back to the soil. They use farms alternately, cultivating one farm while the other farm is in fallow period letting secondary forests to grow. The need to produce crops at a faster rate have lead to more intensive agriculture that could lead to rapid soil exhaustion and posing more threat to the forests.

Conventional views on kaingin perceive it only as bad for the forest and the environment. This is legitimized by a policy issued by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources that bans kaingin. This is a policy that just might be more detrimental to people and the forests, since this is stopping generations-old practice without giving better alternatives for livelihood. Many of the forests and key biodiversity areas in the world are within the territories of indigenous peoples. Through traditional practices such as shifting cultivation, they are able to produce crops that sustain their livelihood keeping the need to maintain the forests for other functions such as sacred grounds where spirits thrive, watershed or hunting and gathering grounds. The kaingin ban could may as well be promoting more cutting of trees and over-harvesting of forest products to compensate the loss of livelihood produced from kaingin.