Waste-to-compost model offers farmers fertilizer fallback
Fertilizer is critical to agricultural productivity, particularly for rice, which requires large amounts of urea to produce healthy grains.
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Fertilizer is critical to agricultural productivity, particularly for rice, which requires large amounts of urea to produce healthy grains.
When the Villar Foundation (VF), under then congresswoman Cynthia A. Villar, spearheaded the rehabilitation of the Las Pinas-Zapote River starting 2002, waste management was an important component of the project. Preventing trash from polluting the river inspired Villar’s Kitchen and Garden Waste Composting Project (KGWCP), which enjoined households in Las Piñas City to recycle kitchen and garden wastes into organic fertilizer to divert these biodegradable materials from landfills and return them to the soil.
The successful river rehabilitation won for the project and VF the United Nations-Water for Life “Best Practices” Award in 2011 for its holistic approach to water and waste management. Its off-shoot project, the KGWCP, also won the World’s Best Environmental Project by Energy Globe Awards from Austria in 2022, for contributing to sustainability and resource efficiency.
The grassroots environmental solution evolved into a scalable model for sustainable urban agriculture while promoting organic farming. Then senator Villar and the VF donated 73 composting machines to villages in Las Piñas City that produced up to 73 tons of organic fertilizer every month, converting roughly half of the city’s total garbage, into usable agricultural inputs. The impact is both environmental and economic. It saved the city approximately P300 million that would otherwise have been spent on garbage hauling and disposal.
The Foundation regularly distributes free organic fertilizer and vegetable seeds to encourage urban gardening among residents, not only in Las Piñas but in communities across the country. To sustain public awareness and enthusiasm, VF established the Urban Gardening Festival and Cooking Competition, held every May.
As senator, Villar reinforced the waste-to-fertilizer model by giving composting legal status. In 2021, she championed Republic Act 11511 which amends RA 10068 or the Organic Agriculture Act of 2010. The law aimed to promote, develop and strengthen organic agriculture in the Philippines and benefit more than 165,000 organic farmers by establishing their affordable accreditation as organic practitioners under the Participatory Guarantee System (PGS). PGS made organic certification affordable to smallholder farmers.
Building on this momentum, Villar also passed RA 12078, amending RA 8178 or the “Agricultural Tariffication Act as amended by RA 11203, extending the Rice Tariffication Law until 2031 and allocating a P30-billion budget for local farmers. A portion of the budget covered priority projects that would address food security, including creation of composting facilities for biodegradable wastes which shall be used to address the micronutrient deficiencies in the soil.
Complementing this legislation, Villar secured funding for composting equipment distributed through the Bureau of Soils and Water Management (BSWM).
Since 2012 and while chairperson for the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Food, Villar worked for the yearly budget allocation of the Department of Agriculture-BSWM in providing small scale composting facilities for biodegradable wastes, distributing rotary composter and shredding machine to various farmer cooperatives, irrigators’ associations and local government units across the country.
Fertilizer is critical to agricultural productivity, particularly for rice, which requires large amounts of urea to produce healthy grains. The organic fertilizer can be used for rice farming by adding animal manure.
With prices rising and supply uncertainties deepening, application rates for the 2026-2027 grain crops could plunge across Southeast Asia, making locally produced organic fertilizer not just an environmental choice, but an urgent food security measure. VF’s two-decade experiment may well be the model the rest of the country needs now.
With the geopolitical tension in the Middle East sending fertilizer prices soaring and threatening to shrink Philippine rice and vegetable outputs, a domestic antidote that has been decades in the making and the VF’s more than 20 years of commitment to self-sufficiency are finally taking center stage.
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