Going Bananas: Restoring Livelihoods of Conflict Affected Farmers in Cotabato

This project aims to contribute to peace and sustainable economic development by restoring agriculture-based livelihoods of over 12,000 farmer households in Carmen, North Cotabato (The Philippines). The project focus will be to promote economic growth in the agricultural sector, to further contribute to building sustainable and ecologically sound food chains and to reduce malnutrition. It will contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to the policies towards inclusive green economic growth.
Key outcomes and outputs:

• At least 2,000 directly targeted farmers experience an improved income (50 %) and an increase in nutrition status and food security for their families (9,000 individuals).
• At least 12,000 directly targeted farmers experience an improved income and an increase in nutrition status and food security for their families (54,000 individuals).
• At least 2,800 jobs (fte) created in high-value organic banana agriculture input provision, production and processing, of which 2,000 are under outgrower contract and 300 in processing by Treelife.
• Establishing a sustainable and growing market for organic bananas in Cotabato.
• Improving the socio-economic position of women.

The district of Carmen in the Philippines has the potential to develop from a food-insecure post-conflict area into a highly productive one. The project will use the investment of the company Treelife and the municipality to address the main challenges of the area.

These challenges include poverty and climate change. The poverty of the area can be led back to the difficulty people faced in improving their livelihoods after a long period of conflict. The project will work on the value chain for farmers that want to ‘go bananas’, meaning they will supply Treelife with bananas for processing. The project will use that contact with the farming communities to address the challenges of climate change. Through a series of real examples of climate resilient farming, incentives in the form of seedlings and improved market opportunities (premium prices) as well as landscape interventions, the selected farmers will transform from hand-to-mouth economy into productive smallholders. Because the project is carried out in a post conflict situation, extra care is taken to ensure equal distribution of the project benefits. This means that all groups, returnees, indigenous peoples and settlers will be included. Particularly women have struggled with the effects of the conflict; the programme is gender transformative and looks at the poorest of the poor, who are mainly women. The interventions take place at three levels:

• Farm level: Farms will become climate-resilient producers of organic produce.
• Market access level: The access to markets is achieved by improved infrastructure (processing plants, access roads and logistics).
• Landscape level: Climate-smart technologies of water harvesting will reduce the impact of climate change.

Scaling of the project takes place through private sector development in combination with government programmes in the districts of Mindanao.

• Public-private partnership with main funding from the ‘Netherlands Enterprise Agency’

• Aidenvironment, Netherlands
• Treelife, Philippines
• Municipality of Carmen, Philippines
• University of Southern Mindanao (USM), Philippines

• Bhullar Gurbir (Department of International Cooperation)

• Goldmann Eva (Department of International Cooperation)

• Resilient Cropping Systems (Department of International Cooperation, FiBL Switzerland)