Permaculture is a relatively new concept in the Philippine agriculture and development sectors. When and where it was exactly introduced is yet to be known. The lack of literature on the history of permaculture in the Philippines has proved difficult in identifying the actors involved in the history of the movement. As a result of this knowledge gap, there is still no published data regarding the profile of its adopters and the number of its practitioners in the country. Fortunately, we can gain insight into the permaculture movement by reviewing other sustainable (or alternative) farming systems, such as organic agriculture in particular. The author’s experience with local permaculture practitioners led to the hypothesis that the organic agriculture movement may have prepared the groundwork for permaculture to take root in the country. The two approaches are closely related since permaculture practitioners consider organic as the primary means of crop production within a permaculture design system.
Prior to the 1970s, the Philippines has been growing crops using traditional methods of farming (Lesaca, 2012 as cited by Suner et al, 2016) which can be considered ‘organic’ in today’s standards. Then global food security threats paved the way for a technological breakthrough in agriculture research and industry called the Green Revolution (Suner et al, 2016). After decades of ‘conventional’ or ‘industrial’ farming (Maghirang et al., 2013), landscapes began to change and the effects were damaging to both people and the environment. We can hypothesize that permaculture may have arrived in the 1980s at the time when non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and farmers’ groups began criticizing the Green Revolution and the effects of chemical farming on health and the environment. These sentiments were articulated by the Farmers Assistance Board in “Profits for Poison” by Noel Mondejar in 1980 and “The Miracle that Never Was” by the Agency for Community Education and Service in the mid-80s (Carating and Tejada, 2012). During this decade, NGOs advocated for a shift to traditional ways and promoted organic farming (Suner at el, 2016) in an attempt to restore farming communities and agricultural landscapes. It is also probable that permaculture may have entered the sustainable agriculture conversation in the 1990s when the low-external-input-sustainable-agriculture (LEISA) global movement gained traction in the Philippines through the formation of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the Philippine Forum for Sustainable Agriculture (Carating and Tejada, 2012). Though there is no published evidence regarding the link between LEISA and permaculture in the country, the arrival of the former has helped push the larger sustainable agriculture agenda forward.
The earliest piece of published evidence of Filipino participation in the permaculture movement is found in the conference proceedings of the Sixth International Permaculture Conference in Perth, Australia in 1996. University of the Philippines Los Banos-College of Agriculture (UPLB-CA) professor, Teodoro Mendoza, presented a paper in the conference entitled, “Upscaling the Adoption of Ecologically Sound Agriculture in the Philippines” which promoted sustainable agriculture among rice farmers (Permaculture Association of Western Australia Inc., 1996). Coincidentally, just four years later, the Philippine Permaculture Association (PPA) was formed in 2000.
In an interview conducted by the author in 2018 with PPA director, Bert Peeters, it was revealed that permaculture was introduced to him by a Columban priest named Fr. John Leydon of the Global Catholic Climate Movement (GCCM) in the late 1990s. It was Peeters, a product of PRI-Australia in 2000, who conducted possibly the first Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course in 2008 at Cabiokid Foundation Inc. in Cabiao, Nueva Ecija. In 2010, graduates of the PDC course and the PPA organized the 1st Philippine Permaculture Convergence in Cebu. In the same year, the national government finally mainstreamed organic agriculture by implementing RA 10068 or the Organic Agriculture Act of 2010 through the Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Agriculture Program (Maghirang et al., 2013).
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