Marginal smallholder upland farmers in the Philippines are among the most vulnerable groups to farming shocks such as climate change, natural calamities particularly typhoons and drought, and more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. In general, upland farms in Isabela are rainfed and farmers are engaged in the corn monocropping system which is highly dependent on external inputs. During the global Covid-19 pandemic, the production system of these farming communities was seriously disrupted. Farmers experienced limited supply of agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides with increased prices by two to threefold during the pandemic. With the rising cost of agricultural inputs, crop production became more expensive leading to limited farmland being tilled. On the contrary, the buying price of their produce reduced significantly by almost 47%. The farming communities faced significantly high risk due to disruptions to farmers’ production system.

This capacity development project under the APN CAPaBLE program puts emphasis on improving the farming systems of marginal smallholder upland farmers so that they are ready to adapt to expected future shocks and risks. This project aims to enhance the adaptive capacity of smallholder farmers in the uplands, redesign their production systems into an appropriate agroforestry system, and transform these communities to be shock resilient. Agroforestry has the potential to build the food and livelihood resilience of smallholder farmers to adapt to global, regional, and local challenges. The resilience level of these selected upland communities was evaluated based on five capital assets for sustainable livelihood, to wit: financial, physical, natural, human, and social capital assets. Results of the assessment showed that the three upland farming communities had a low level of resiliency.

The project focuses on enhancing the capacity of the upland farmers and the agricultural technicians of local government units (LGUs) in assessing their lands’ capability for agroforestry development through the use of the Agroforestry Land Capability Mapping Scheme (ALCAMS) tool; and the design and development of appropriate agroforestry systems in their locality for sustainable production system and livelihood. Capacity-building programs were organized to enhance the awareness and capabilities of farmer organization members, local government units, and government agency technical staff on appropriate agroforestry system design and development and management of corn-based agroforestry system towards building farming community resilience to farming shocks threats such as Covid-19 pandemic, typhoons, and drought. In each project site, one appropriate agroforestry model was established to serve as a show window to the farmers and as a hands-on training site for farmers, LGU technician partners, and other collaborators. A policy analysis workshop was organized to determine the current policies related to resilience-building programs/projects. Representatives from concerned local government units and farmer organizations attended the workshop. Another workshop was convened to present/disseminate the outputs of the project and raise awareness on the importance of building the resiliency of smallholder farmers in the upland communities. Policy recommendations were formulated to serve as the collaborators’ reference in their future resilience-building programs and projects.