Typhoon Haiyan Survivors' Food Security Project

Dear All Friends,

Warm greetings from Leyte and thank you very much for your continuing generous support for our initiative to provide food supply via vegetable gardens here in Leyte. This project is indeed creating continuous positive impact as local gardeners are able to produce their own food and retain some mature plants for the seeds to be used for continuous planting. We train them to focus on the use of open pollinated vegetables rather than hybrids since open pollinated grow well. This time we are able to distribute a total of 1,750 seed packets to 440 families living in 3 barrios in Ormoc City and Albuera Municipality.  Best of all we are able to engage farmer-cooperators to produce vegetable seeds by not harvesting the young plants and letting it mature until they bear seeds. We now have 7 farmer cooperators producing legume, okra, beans and squash seeds.

Again thank you very much for your kind help.

Very sincerely yours,

Cora

Dear All Friends,

 Warm greetings from Leyte. Our effort to provide food security support via vegetable gardening to poor farmers in Leyte is given a big boost by our purchase of a 1-hectare learning site in Albuera Municipality. We found out when we conduct our garden initiative here is that there is a massive lack of simple backyard garden techniques and that our approach to conduct irregular trainings is slow and not so effective. Our approach will be called “enrichment of food-life” that will encompass more than just producing food to alleviate hunger but emphasize the value of producing and sharing healthy food in a manner sustainable to the environment and to the community, through the cooperative efforts of the community. Our approach will stress the importance of making the best use of locally available resources and it leads toward the development of vibrant self-reliant rural communities.

Right now, we are producing our own source of vegetable seeds from the learning farm and we are in the process of establishing a modest sleeping quarters and a simple bamboo training venue for upcoming trainees. Aside from the vegetables we will also develop modules for native chickens and native pigs, plant permanent crops and harvest rain-water for the plants. The learning site will be sustained from revenues coming from the sales of farm products and fees of trainees.

 Hoping that we are successful in this and thank you very much for your continuing support.

 Very sincerely yours,

 Cora