Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

COLLAGES OF BETTERMENT 187A STUDY OF COMMUNICATION CAMPAIGN PROCESSES ON THEISSUE OF COMMUNITY RIGHTS TO BIODIVERSITY RESOURCES INTHE PHILIPPINESVarinthra Kaiyourawong BoonchaiIntroductionGlobalization takes place in the form of the dominationof economic and cultural centers as well as in the protestsagainst the domination of marginalized cultures. It makespeople’s attempts to transcend sociocultural differencesmore difficult. Although local communities and farmersmake up the biggest subgroup of the population, thestate marginalizes local people and excludes them frommanaging biodiversity and local resources because localpeople have no power to mobilize. They have limitedchannels of communication and, therefore, cannotpush policies forward.Local people’s movements are asking for more rightsto manage local resources in order to conserve theirecological systems and strengthen their economicand social self-reliance. The experiences of nongovernmentorganizations (NGOs) in the Philippinesin communicating and establishing a dialogue amongcommunities to gain public acceptance of communities’rights and local wisdom paint a successful pictureof how grassroots people’s movements can createcommunication patterns that are able to transcendsociocultural and political differences. Their campaignson local rice varieties have successfully changed farmers’behavior from growing the high yielding rice varietiespromoted by state agencies, which are expensive sincethey require chemicals (e.g., fertilizer, pesticides) toachieve their high yield potential, to developing newvarieties from farmers’ own initiatives. It is, therefore,interesting to study how the NGOs in the Philippinescommunicate with farmers to create and develop theirown rice varieties.The objectives of my research are: 1) to study thecommunication strategies and patterns used by NGOsto promote farmers’ rights to biodiversity resources; 2)to study which social conditions and contexts are ableto transcend sociocultural and economic differences;3) to find out what conditions have contributed to thesuccess or failure of such communication campaigns;and 4) to find out the ways to apply these patterns ofcommunication campaigning to people’s movements inThailand. I chose the Southeast Asia Regional Initiativefor Community Empowerment (SEARICE) to be myhost organization because it is an NGO working on theissue of farmers’ rights to biodiversity resources in thePhilippines. It also has a vast experience in campaigningon this issue not only at the local and national levelsbut also at the international level. SEARICE workstowards a just democratic civil society that upholdspeople’s creative and sustainable utilization of naturalresources. It implements the Community BiodiversityDevelopment and Conservation and Biodiversity Useand Conservation in Asia Program (CBDC-BUCAP).My case study focused on the Biodiversity Developmentand Conservation (CBDC) program, a ten-year oldglobal program on plant genetic resources. CBDCevolved around formal-informal system partnerships,developing methodologies and undertaking researcheswhile organizing farmers into groups to secure theirseed supply system, improve their economic gains andbuild social and political spaces (SEARICE 2007). Iconducted a review of the literature written by SEARICEas well as other documents related to the issue. I alsoorganized key informant and group interviews of theorganizations’ campaign staff and representatives of thecampaign target groups, and observed communicationcampaign processes in the local areas. The study tooktwelve months.The Community Biodiversity Development andConservation (CBDC) Program—Bohol Project: Acase studySEARICE chose the towns of Bilar, Batuan, Carmenand Dagohoy in the province of Bohol as the Philippinesites of the Southeast Asian location for the CommunityBiodiversity Development and Conservation (CBDC)program because of the very low genetic diversity inthese towns when the project started in 1996.In 2001, SEARICE released a technical report regardingrice farming from the CBDC Bohol project. Thesocioeconomic survey, which included the barangaysof Campagao and Cansumbol in Bilar and Malitbog inDagohoy, showed that the rice situation is as follows:farmers have limited resources of land and capital. Thislack of resources, particularly capital, affects the netfarm income of farmers.Asian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows