Esther Penunia, AFA Secretary General
Closing Message
Celebrating the Achievements of AFOSP-MTCP2
27 April 2021 | Zoom
A pleasant day to all of you, dear friends, colleagues from country FO platforms, and dear partners, who have come here today for the wrap-up activity of the project: ASEAN Farmers Organizations’ Support Program or AFOSP-MTCP2.
AFA has been in existence since 2002 and has implemented projects since then, but MTCP2, along with AFOSP, is the first medium-term, five to six-year project that we have managed.
It is also the biggest project we have to date, allowing us to reach and to provide more services to FOs beyond the membership of AFA. This is also the first time in our history that we are celebrating the closure of a project. And rightly so, because, listening to all the presentations today, there is indeed much cause for celebration.
Today, we feel proud of the achievements we have achieved together. Proud that we are seeing that our dreams, ambitions, and hopes as farmers’ organizations, are coming true. We look back on the day we started implementing AFOSP-MTCP2, many partner FOs can be considered “young” then. Now, we see thriving farmers’ organizations, with a substantial increase in membership, maturity, and capacity in delivering significant impact to their members. What made me proudest most in all the country presentations was all the, what we call, “kuwento na may kwenta”, or stories that have figures, numbers, and calculations, whether it is on the number of public policies approved, farmers reached, services rendered, and increase in income. And what touched me most were the human stories of growth, like the young lady farmer who said she was shy but now is confident, the farmers’ group who used organic vegetable production to rehabilitate drug users, gamblers, and alcoholics, and the woman farmer who now can send her child to school. It is difficult to put a figure on this kind of impact. Now, I would like to ask you, to let us show we all feel proud and happy by clicking the clap reaction on your zoom screen.
Today, we feel thankful for our development partners EU and IFAD. Without your unrelenting support, we would not have realized the objectives of the programme and reached all those accomplishments. Thank you to the ASEAN Foundation, the ASEAN Secretariat, and ACEDAC. Now I would like to ask you, to let us show we are thankful to our partners by clicking the heart button on our zoom screen.
Yet, today, amidst the covid 19 pandemic’s deadlier wave, we feel challenged. As more and more people become sick, and sometimes die, or lose their jobs and their incomes and therefore more and more unable to provide food on the table for their families, family farmers persevere and continue to fish and farm in lowlands, hills, pastures, and mountains but unable to access markets or store their produce, as climate change continues to affect our harvests, as lands continue to be degraded and grabbed, as policymakers continue to sideline family farmers, we are challenged to fully play our role as food heroes, to contribute in cooling the planet, in promoting food security and nutrition, in reducing hunger, poverty, and inequality. With the trust given by the EU and IFAD to again manage upcoming big projects like ARISE and FOA, we feel hopeful that we can live up to the challenge. That we will be able to maximize the opportunities presented by global tools such as the UNDFF, the UNDROP, the SDGs, and now the Food Systems Summit so that every family farmer is happy, is healthy, can make both ends meet and their children can go to school and then still opt to stay farming or work in agriculture-related fields. Because of No Farmer. No Food. No Future. Long Live Family Farmers!
Thank you for your attention.
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