Our COVID-19 Response

Aduyon Initiative: Food Security Through Mutual Help

As we face uncertain times, we hope you are all staying healthy and taking all the recommended precautions. As a world community, we are all experiencing isolation, distance from our loved ones, and perhaps even fear about where are next meal might come from. We believe that now more than ever people will begin growing their own food and learn the immense value of saving seeds. This is the wisdom our incredible partner farmers have always had.

While our direct programming is on pause right now (to protect the health of our staff and community partners) we have been honored to continue to ensure our partner farmers and many others have a market to sell their vegetables and that the most vulnerable communities in the greater Metro Manila area have access to healthy fresh food.

Through our Aduyon Initiative, or the Ibaloy practice of mutual help and reciprocal work, we hope that communities can continue to rely on the strength of farmers, and that farmers can count on the support of the communities they feed. By participating in aduyon, we are branching out to work with others while remaining rooted in our vision of hunger-free and healthy communities that have access to sustainable, farmer-produced seeds and food.

Since implementing the Aduyon Initiative we have: 

• Delivered over 720,000 pounds of vegetables.
• Reached over 50,000 families in the vulnerable areas of Metro Manila and provided access to food. 
• Maintained the livelihood of over 500 farmers from 6 municipalities in Benguet Province: Tublay, Atok, Bugias, Kapangan, Kabayan and Kibungan. 
• Created daily wage jobs for 70 individual vegetable packers. 
• Sold over 15M Philippines Pesos (nearly $300,000 USD) of vegetables. 

In better times we at Global Seed Savers often said #nofarmernofood but under Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) and in dealing with COVID-19, we are reminded of just how crucial it is to support our farmers and persist in working toward food security and seed sovereignty. While travel and our program work is temporarily on hold, we maintain assistance to our partner farmers by providing them with vitamins, probiotics, and emergency kits.

Our work will and must continue and we need your help now more than ever to make this possible.

Please consider making a donation to ensure our food and seed sovereignty programming can continue!

As an organization working with smallholder farmers, we trust in the small, quiet work of seeds and know that if we plant the right ones, the harvest will be good. Stay safe and healthy everyone!

Aduyon Partners Include:

Municipality of Tublay Benguet Province, Philippines Business for Social Progress, CARE Philippines, PAGASA, Project Liwanag

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