The Department of Agriculture-Scaling up of the Second Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resource Management Project (DA-CHARMP2 Scale-up) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) featured the Project’s best practices and lessons learned in its three decades of operation in the Cordilleras during a Visibility Forum on January 11, 2021.
Gleaning from the Project’s best practices and lessons learned, the virtual forum served as venue for the Project to present its best practices and key learnings to a broader audience and to elevate the policy recommendations that were drawn from these. Four thematic presentations were presented namely – Participatory planning monitoring approach: Contributing to collaborative action with indigenous peoples’ communities and local government; Collective land tenure rights and sustainable land management in the context of ancestral domain systems; Sustainable partnerships for environmental governance; and Upland agriculture value chain in the Cordilleras: Opportunities and challenges.
Gathered feedbacks and inputs from the participants will be used in enhancing the policy recommendations that will, in return, be used to contribute to the DA’s move towards an upland agricultural framework for the country. Further, the outputs will be used to further enhance ongoing programs and initiatives in the IP communities.
The CHARM Project is the longest foreign-assisted special project under the DA that operated in the Cordillera highlands which can be traced back to the Highland Agriculture Development Project or HADP in 1987. It sought to reduce poverty by increasing the household income of the target beneficiaries and enhancing the quality of life in the project areas.
DA Secretary William D. Dar, in his message, said that the interplay of the Project strategies vis-à-vis local dynamics, as the Project officially ended on December 31 last year, leaves lessons learned and innovations that are worthy of study and reflection in implementing agricultural and rural development for the highlands of the country.
Meanwhile, Project partners at different levels also gave their responses/reflections about the presentations and the Project in general. They were farmer-entrepreneur/restaurateur Elmer Macalingay (Private Sector); Kapangan, Benguet Municipal Mayor Manny Fermin (Municipal Level), and NEDA-CAR Assistant Regional Director Stephanie Christiansen (Regional level). Four panels of experts who were also engaged with the Project shared their expertise and contributed to the policies being recommended. The panelists were Jeanira Okubo, Danilo Songco, Dave de Vera, and Mary Ann Botengan.
The activity was participated in by at least 90 participants: Project stakeholder-representatives; local government units; IFAD-assisted Projects; national and regional line agencies including its attached agencies; UN Agencies specifically the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Asian Development Bank (ADB), and World Bank, and other private sector representatives.
In closing, Country Programme Director Alessandro Marini put emphasis on participatory processes in bringing about development while respecting IP rights to their domains. He also challenged the DA on how to scale up the Project’s best practices and lessons learned at the national level so that it will not remain in the Cordilleras.**