BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
IT WAS a happy day, a happy week. It was mango harvest week in the Aeta indigenous community in Zambales and Juan Garcia, a tribal leader, and members of his village were leading us to their mango trees in the mountain area.
They were harvesting fair trade, organically-certified mangoes that would be processed in a factory into mango puree, packed into sealed bags and steel drums, and shipped to Germany to be used in organic foods. It had been three years since the organic, naturally-flowering mango trees in the mountains had given a harvest.
Climate change brought rains at the wrong time and washed away the flowers. Then, insects came and laid their eggs in the flowers so they died. The heat came and enlarged the fruit on the trees and they split. This year, the trees adapted and there was a small harvest.
The three years had been hard for the Aeta mango farmers without a harvest of pico and carabao varieties of mango by the indigenous farmers. They are from the Aeta community that live in the mountain areas of Zambales and where Preda Fair Trade has an association with them. They are the original inhabitants of the Philippines since some thirty thousand years ago. They came from Borneo and crossed to the islands on land bridges that are now long submerged.
They survived and thrived as hunters and gatherers in the rain forests that covered the Philippine archipelago for thousands of years. They have a wide knowledge of herbal plants to cure illness and were deadly with bow and arrow used for hunting. When settlers from Asia came, they did not resist the incursions being peaceful by nature they remained in the forests. They speak their own language, Zambal, and Filipino also.
The colonial period of Spanish domination and then American occupation saw the continual destruction of the rainforests. After World War II and independence was granted, some privileged families became very rich and formed dynasties and gained political power. The logging of the rain forests grew on a massive scale and are now all gone, many trees and plants extinct.
Just three percent of the Philippines has primeval rain forests. The remainder of the rainforests in ancestral lands of indigenous people is under threat despite laws protecting it. Mining corporations get special exceptions from their friends in the government regulatory agencies and are grabbing the ancestral lands of the indigenous people and cutting the forests to get the minerals below the forest floor. The indigenous communities are resisting and many of their advocates and eco-defenders have been killed. In the past ten years, more than 1,700 have been murdered throughout the world while defending their ancestral lands and forests against illegal loggers and miners, according to a report by Global Witness. In 2021, four activists were killed every week.
The Aeta people did not resist the destruction of their rain forest. They became survival farmers on their denuded ancestral mountain lands growing cassava, sweet potatoes, bananas, vegetables and fruits like mango, avocado and jackfruit. (To be continued)/PN
