Year of …

Did you know that there are 39 “small island nations” in the world, and that one of them is among the world’s most prosperous countries?

Or that 56 percent of the world’s agricultural lands are small family farms, with a crucial role for the world’s food security?

I didn’t, until I had to research on the United Nations’ designation of certain themes for the year 2014. The UN likes to declare International Year of this or that, hoping to raise public awareness about particular issues, but even with the declarations, and all kinds of activities, they, as well as the world’s governments, have a long way to go to use these international-year designations.

I titled today’s column “Year of …” because the efforts around these commemorations tend to trail off, and awareness of the issues still tends to be limited to people already working on the particular issue. With 2014 ending, I thought I should at least try to catch up with more information on the year’s international assignments. Given that I have to talk about the four themes in one column, my discussion will have to be superficial. Do check the Internet if you want more information on particular themes.

Can you guess now what international years were designated by the UN for 2014?

There were four very different themes, all of them important, and relevant to the average Filipino. Yet, I do not recall reading or hearing about these themes: “Family Farming,” “Small Island Developing States,” “Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” and “Crystallography.”

Family farms

It was around November when I accidentally found that 2014 is the International Year of Family Farming. This was when I was talking with a Thai professor about how a number of Thailand’s agricultural experts actually studied in the Philippines back in the 1960s. Now, we have been left behind.

Almost as if to console me, the professor said that at least for agriculture, the differences in development happened because Thailand had given more attention to small family farms. He mentioned the International Year of Family Farming, and how Thailand’s universities had organized symposiums on and conducted research into small family-managed farms as a key to long-term food security.

We got to talking about the other issue related to small farms: agrarian reform. Neighboring Taiwan’s agriculture has developed much more rapidly than those of the Philippines and Thailand, and there, agrarian reform makes a difference. In the 1950s, the government of Taiwan redistributed lands to many small farmers who still form the backbone of that country’s agriculture.

The UN has all kinds of statistics highlighting the role of small farming which, it emphasizes, is not just in terms of agriculture but also of fisheries, forestry and pastoral or livestock production. In many countries, the Philippines included, it’s families who use lands that are difficult to farm—those that are upland, for example. It is also these family farms that still plant traditional food varieties, once dismissed as backward but now recognized as sturdier, better adapted to local conditions.

Island states

“Small is beautiful” could as well have been an overarching theme for the year because another 2014 UN theme is “Small Island Developing States,” 39 of them with 63 million people.

We tend to think of small island states as those scattered in the Pacific, places like Fiji and Palau. (You’ll find many overseas Filipino workers in many of these Pacific island states.) There’s the sad state of Nauru, the world’s second smallest sovereign state after the Vatican. In the 1960s and 1970s Nauru had the world’s highest per capita income because of its rich phosphate deposits. But these have now been depleted, plunging Nauru into a deep crisis.

There are many other island states scattered throughout the world. There are the Caribbean countries like Jamaica, Dominica, and feisty Cuba, which dared talk back to the United States for decades. In the Indian Ocean there are Seychelles and Mauritius, popular tourist destinations.

And the rich island nation I asked about at the beginning of the article?

That’s Singapore, which has no significant agriculture of its own but which has managed to provide for its population of 5 million through careful state planning.

The UN’s concern with the island nations came about more because of climate change, which has made these nations more vulnerable to storm surges and rises in the sea level.

Does that sound familiar? The UN may as well have included the Philippines among the small island nations, considering that we have so many of those islands, many of which are almost like feudal kingdoms controlled by powerful warlord-politicians. The concerns with small island nations should apply as well to our many islands.

Palestine, crystals

Regarding “Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” many tend to think of Palestine mainly as “Arab” and “Muslim” and forget that it was the birth place of Judaism and Christianity. (“Arab” is not a religious label—there are also Christian Arabs.)

The “Palestine question” dates back many decades, when the world’s imperial powers carved up the Middle East. The creation of Israel in 1947 displaced the Palestinians, and the war that followed is still referred to as “el-Nakbah,” the catastrophe or cataclysm. Over the years, Palestinians were able to restore a state of Palestine, which is now recognized by 135 of the UN’s 193 member-states. The Philippines is not among the 135. Last May, Pope Francis made an explicit reference in a speech to the “state of Palestine.”

Finally, “Crystallography.” The year 2014 marks the centenary of modern crystallography, or why scientists have been able to figure out biological and chemical structures. It was crystallography that led to the discovery of DNA, the basic genetic building block for all living organisms. Crystallography has allowed us to create chips and computer memories, to discover new drugs. It’s also crystallography that has inspired art forms, and new architectural structures.

Mention crystals and nonscientists still think of magical quartz stones with all kinds of claims for healing. Maybe schools can still catch up in 2015 to use the centenary of modern crystallography to highlight the far more important roles of crystals in our lives.

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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph