Those involved in feeding the hungry and undernourished, especially children, are always looking for ways and means of synergizing with like-minded groups to maximize the impact of their efforts. In one of our planning sessions of the Philippine Food Bank Foundation, we invited as potential partner the former Philippine Ambassador to Singapore, Ambassador Joseph Yap.  As our Foundation is increasingly receiving raw or semi-processed food products that would require cooking or processing, we took interest in The Loaves and Fish Foundation, Inc. (LXFFI), a non-stock, non-profit corporation committed to providing nutritious meals to needy beneficiaries through partner parishes and organizations in the Philippines.  LXFFI is inspired by the highly acclaimed and successful soup kitchen run by Willing Hearts charity in Singapore.  LXFFI is envisioned to be supported by donations and wholly run by volunteers assisted by a handful of staff.  Ambassador Yap was responsible for replicating the Singapore experience in the Philippines. There is a kitchen now operating at a site in Alabang with a capacity of 1,000 meals per shift.  It is equipped with industrial capacity kitchen.   The first meal was served last February 12. 2024.  It operates 365 days a year and have as beneficiaries the elderly, the disabled, low-income families, children from single parent families or otherwise poverty-stricken households.  In Singapore, it served migrant workers.

            There are multiple ways of collaborating with the Foundation.  There are volunteers who devote 2 to 3 hours on a Saturday or after office hours for food preparation and washing and cleaning of the used dishes and kitchenware.   Cash contributions as small as P50 which will help feed one person to P50,000 which will help feed 1,000 people.  Donations in kind include preserved or fresh food products, condiments and cleaning supplies.  As December 31, 2024, over 157,600 meals had been served, with 25 beneficiary groups, involving 550 volunteers.  We offered to Ambassador Yap to collaborate with Loaves and Fish Foundation by providing their kitchens with some of the raw vegetables, fruits and other ingredients for cooking meals for their beneficiaries. 

The approach of LXFFI can easily be replicated by numerous communities or parishes all over the country where high and middle-income households live in subdivisions or residential areas that are surrounded by depressed communities.  Whether through civic organizations like the Rotary Club or the Lions Club or through Church parishes, some of the better-off families in the neighborhood can establish feeding clinics like those of LXFFI and then invite members of the marginalized households, especially children, to take their meals in a venue that is especially equipped to serve food and drinks to the needy. Food banks like the Philippine Food Bank Foundation would be more than happy to donate some of the goods they receive to these community-organized feeding stations.  There can also be Public Private Partnership (PPP) arrangements between LGUs and private enterprises and NGOs in feeding programs for the marginalized households, with special emphasis on the children. Venues in public schools can be used for the feeding programs while the supply of donated food can come from the private sector. There is no better use of public school facilities than the feeding of undernourished children who suffer most from stunting because of lack of food for the brain and thus become unfit for learning in the public schools.  No wonder Filipino students do very poorly in international achievement tests in reading, mathematics and science.

            Another food bank model that combines giving fish and teaching how to fish is Singapore Crawfish that reached out to the Philippine Food Bank recently.  Singapore Crawfish, as its Marketing Manager Mary April Bona explained to us, is a global leader in sustainable aquaculture that has been at the forefront of developing eco-friendly farming techniques that help marginalized communities grow nutritious food while preserving the environment.  Its innovative crawfish farming technology and methods have helped farmers worldwide increase their income by 400 %, empowering them to thrive economically and sustainably.  The farmer beneficiaries can benefit from increased source of protein in a relatively short period of time (less than six months) so that there is really a combination of literally giving fish to the hungry and teaching them how to fish.

            Key high highlights of the initiative of Singapore Crawfish for charitable partnerships are:

1.      Sustainability and eco-friendliness. Its crawfish farming methods rely on low-cost, minimal-input techniques that are environmentally friendly, promoting carbon-neutral practices.

2.     Empowering Rural Communities.  Crawfish are highly resilient and can be grown in a variety of environments, making them ideal food sources for rural and impoverished regions.  With low-income barriers to entry, anyone—men, women, and even students—can grow crawfish with little difficulty.

3.     Fighting Hunger with Affordable Solutions:  crawfish farming technology requires very little capital, making it a viable and sustainable way for underprivileged communities to grow their own food and to attain food security.  Together with all the assistance the Government can render to the millions of small farmers in the Philippines, teaching them to grow crawfish is a way to reduce poverty in the Philippines, even if it may not do much to increase over-all productivity of the AFF sector of the Philippines.  Only large-scale approaches to production in the Philippine agricultural and aquacultural sectors can lead to significant increases in agricultural productivity, helping us reverse years, if not decades, of negative or close to zero growth of Philippine agriculture.  One of the first principles learned in an elementary course on economics is the importance of economies of scale for growth and prosperity.

4.     Free education and Training:  Singapore Crawfish is committed to providing and training to both new and experienced farmers, giving them the knowledge and tools to improve their livelihoods.  By adopting the methods that will be transferred to them by Singapore Crawfish, the small farmers cannot only feed their families protein-rich food but also create an additional income stream for them.

5.     Global impact:  Through the partnerships of Singapore Crawfish with international organizations and local communities, it can aim to reach more farmers and individuals, helping them to adopt sustainable practices that reduce hunger and generate income especially in rural communities where the poverty incidence is usually higher than in the urbanized regions.  For example, in the Metro Manila area poverty incidence is a low as 4% of total population, while in some regions in Mindanao and the Visayas, poverty incidence can be as high as 40% or more.

6.     Food security for the Future:  With increasing global food insecurity, sustainable farming offers a reliable source of protein that can be scaled to meet the needs of both local and global populations.

Since the Philippine Food Bank Foundation is not directly in touch with Filipino farmers, its board decided to put Singapore Crawfish in touch with Philippine NGOs that are involved in the upskilling and retooling of existing farmers through formal and short courses in Agribusiness Technology.  Some of these are the Dagatan Dual Agritech School in Lipa, Batangas and an Agritech School being started by some agribusiness entrepreneurs in the province of Negros Occidental, where aquaculture is already an established industry. 

            These are only a sampling of NGOs that are addressing the problem of hunger among the marginalized populations of the Philippines.  I hope that they can serve as role models for many other initiatives all over the Archipelago that will address a two-fold objective:  to reduce the number of Filipino children who become stunted because of under- and mal-nutrition in the first years of life and to improve the learning capacities of our school children, especially in the public schools.  All the organizations described in this series of articles have detailed websites that contain whatever additional information may be desired by the readers.   For comments, my email address is bernardo.villegas@uap.asia.