BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
WHEN I hike into the hills and mountains of Zambales with the Aeta indigenous farmers, their children and families, we are usually on a trek with the Preda fair trade team to plant grafted mango saplings, calamansi or rambutan trees. This is on the mountains where the mangoes are certified organic according to EU standards. This is a great achievement for the indigenous people.
The Aeta people claim the mountains as their ancestral lands but around the world the rights of the indigenous peoples to the ancestral lands are challenged by mining companies and land grabbers supported by corrupt politicians and officials.
These mountains were once lush rainforests where the ancestors of the Aeta people (once called Negritos, their DNA traced them back to Africa) lived and survived in peace as self-sufficient hunters and gatherers. They loved and respected their forests, they cared for the natural world and the birds and animals. The climate was secure, steady, predictable and trust-worthy for the past generations. The Aeta people knew when it would rain, when it would not. They knew where and when they should hunt abundant wild boars and chicken and harvest honey and gather fruits and berries.
They could dig up root crops like cassava and camote (sweet potato) and harvest mangoes and bananas. Having never met a human from outside their own small family groups, they were healthy and had developed their own extensive herbal medicinal healing practice. There was discipline and order to the life of the forests and rivers where they caught fish and shrimps. Their climate was fair and balanced.
That natural life in harmony with the natural world came to an end for the indigenous people of the Philippines and indigenous people all over the world with the arrivals of foreigners. The first migrants into the Philippines after the Negritos had settled in the islands came from Indonesia about 5,000 years ago. Then the Europeans from Spain came when Magellan landed in March 1521. In 1898, the United States took over the Philippines by force from the Filipinos who had overcome the Spaniards.
The Aeta indigenous people and the Filipino people suffered the previously unknown diseases brought by the Europeans. From the start of the colonial period came great climate injustice when the rain forests were cut down from 1945 to rebuild Europe and Japan after WWII.
Then, serious climate change began for the Philippines. The illegal logging continues until the present despite laws banning logging. There is not much left to cut down. When the rainforest that once covered the entire archipelago was gone, only three percent remains, the climate began to change and CO2 and global warming has continued to increase dramatically world-wide.
Climate change has brought more intense rainfall and more typhoons. They displace hundreds of thousands of people and 80 percent of them are women, says the UN Development Program. There are many more droughts in the hot season and floods in the wet season.
Damage to fruit trees by infestation by insects has increased and pesticides now rule the agricultural sector endangering the health of the people, agri-workers and consumers. Cancers are on the increase, too, as a result. (To be continued)/PN
