How can we feed the world? By 2050, the world population is expected to surpass 9 billion. 80 million more people are to be fed each year, while one billion already go to bed hungry. Such challenge baffles world leaders. However, knowing a solution to address this big challenge makes me truly alive. Through organic cassava farming, the farmers of Zamboanga del Sur can show to the world how to address this challenge. The organic cassava farming has a practical way how to address world hunger: to produce enough food per hectare of farm, to prioritize and empower target beneficiaries, to select the right crop, and to do it the organic way. In this way, organic cassava farming shows how to effectively face this challenge.

Like organic cassava farming, the farmer has to produce sufficient food for his family even in one-hectare farm. A cassava farmer can show that one hectare is enough to feed his family and let them live decently. He plants cassava on his one-hectare farm by dividing it equally to ten lots and utilizing only one lot each month until he completes the whole cycle on the tenth month. In the 11th month, he will have substantial harvest from his first lot to give him decent income. By then, he starts to earn a decent income monthly, as his cassava crops are planted in sequence and programmed for monthly harvest, excluding his intercrops income. He again plants cassava on the first lot and begins another cycle in order to sustain his monthly income. By applying organic farming technologies, that is digging a square-foot hole and filling it with organic fertilizers for every hill of cassava, he always recovers the loss of soil fertility and ensures the continuing productivity of his one-hectare farm in spite of its continual use. With this innovation conceptualized and engineered by Governor Antonio Cerilles, the farmers march towards agricultural productivity without harming the planet and compromising the future harvests.

It is important to note that food cannot be distributed equally in every part of the world because hunger happens in varying degrees in every region, country, province and municipality. To address hunger, target beneficiaries have to be prioritized and empowered, just like what the organic cassava program has done. Beneficiaries have to be selected among those who live below the poverty threshold. Those who really need or who experience hunger should be prioritized in any development assistance to address hunger. To empower them to produce food by themselves is the way to do it, otherwise you will be making them mendicants who will still go hungry in the long run. Teach the poor how to produce sufficient food in a sustainable way, like the organic cassava, and they will have enough food in their lifetime.

Choosing a common and versatile crop, like cassava, to fight world hunger is also important. It is crop that can grow in regions where we can find most of the poor – Africa, Asia, Latin America and some parts of India. Cassava is resistant even to the harsh climate, as it can live even with a little amount of water. Cassava has many uses, as it can be used as a staple food, a commercial or an industrial crop. It has an unlimited market demand, because you can just tweak how you use it according to the needs of the market. Cassava can substitute rice or maize as staple food, as it can also be used as snack food processed in variety of ways. Cassava can also be made into flour, starch or alcohol that can be further processed into a variety of products. It can also be used as feedstock for biofuel as an industrial crop. Thus, scaling up cassava production for purposes of addressing world hunger will not lead to oversupply, since it has a variety of uses.

Lastly, interventions have to be done in an organic way in order to effectively address hunger. Organic agriculture is the only proven production system that is sustainable. Conventional agriculture including genetic engineering could not yet show any evidence that its production system could last for ages. What we can see in conventional agriculture is the rising rate of soil degradation and chemical usage that only implies rising farming cost. Only organic agriculture, like the one applied in the organic cassava program, can prove a production system that produces sufficient food sustainably, in spite of the continual use of land resources.

If only the organic cassava program would be replicated in other parts of the world following its strategy– producing enough food per hectare of farm, prioritizing and empowering the target beneficiaries, selecting the right crop, and doing it the organic way, the problem of world hunger could be addressed effectively.