Food Today, Food Tomorrow
@foodtodayfoodtomorrow

In March 2020, with the Extreme Enhanced Community Quarantine (EECQ), the urban poor made up of informal workers, the unemployed, and street dwellers, were among the hardest hit.

Millions of low-income households with no savings to rely on and lived a hand-to-mouth existence knew that the government restrictions enforced on the population meant there was suddenly no way to earn a living–and that no work means no pay means no food.

Through Lingap Maralita, we all came together in solidarity and care to make sure everyone was fed.

We sourced fresh organic vegetables from small farmers and brought to urban poor communities in Metro Manila. Starting on the first week of April, LM was a call for action and solidarity with those most vulnerable to the impacts of the lockdown and barely had social safety nets–our farmers, including the landless farmers organized by Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), who were our food security frontliners and the urban poor whose basic right to food was being ignored.

Once helpless strangers, we became a community of care and solidarity. This showed us that all Filipinos can be fed by building our collective power:

Grounding our strength in bahay kubo biodiversity

Affirming every Filipino's right to good, clean and fair food

Working with citizens to grow food gardens for all

Our community partners expressed their interest in a more sustainable way of securing food-- by growing it themselves. Together, the core team and PLM, through online consultations, created Food Today, Food Tomorrow (FTFT), which it piloted on November 2020, at Golden Shower with 20 volunteer urban growers interested in co-designing a community-based food security strategy. FTFT combines the food relief model (Food Today, previously known as LM), as a way to immediately address hunger while the micro food gardens (Food Tomorrow) take time to grow.

We can make agrobiodiverse gardens as common as sari-sari stores.

Today, with the food gardens we piloted a huge success, we proved that we can provide food security not only for the gardeners' households but their neighbors' too. With the typhoons last year driving up the prices of food, the gardens were like a community pantry at almost zero cost. Bringing the community together weekly for the community kitchens (kusinang bayan) and gardening lessons have furthermore created a bayanihan spirit when it came to the people's collective health.

With your help, we built the power of our Payatas gardeners to grow food. Now they are ready to grow this same power in others.