Australian
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Teacher’s notes

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The clip shows footage from a 1983 Four Corners investigation into a Philippine–Australian aid project in the Philippines. Over footage showing traditional paddy farming on the island of Mindanao, journalist Mary Delahunty outlines the project’s failure to help poor farmers. A local farmer explains in Filipino that he could not afford to continue the program because of his level of debt. Two men work in a field as Delahunty explains that farmers have to purchase the pesticides and fertilisers required by the program.

Educational value points

• This clip reveals the challenge of implementing change in a poor farming community where local farmers have grown crops in the same way for generations. Participation in the Philippine–Australian Development Assistance Project (PADAP) required farmers on Mindanao to adopt multiple-crop farming techniques that meant using new and costly agricultural practices.

• To improve farmers’ yields, the PADAP program on Mindanao aimed to introduce multiple cropping, a farming method in which two or more crops of the same type, such as rice, are harvested in one year. The method requires irrigation channels that direct water to the fields during the dry season, high-yield varieties of crop that mature quickly enough for another crop to be planted, and fertilisers such as nitrogen to replenish soil depleted by the increased cropping.

• Delahunty reports that the PADAP program had not reached the ordinary farmer, indicated by the fact that after five years 91 per cent of farmers in the area were not multiple cropping. The farmers shown in the clip are engaged in wet- or lowland rice cultivation, a traditional form of rice growing that has been undertaken in the region by generations of farmers for more than 7,000 years.

• The apparent failure of an aid project to assist subsistence farmers in Mindanao raises questions about the local knowledge and governance on which such schemes operate. The high failure rate quoted by the narrator may be attributed to the project promoting unfamiliar farming methods, farmers having to go into debt to purchase necessary products and farmers having to make time to participate in education programs.

• PADAP ran in two phases between 1974 and 1985 and cost $50.4 million, of which 355.7 million pesos ($43.1 million) was contributed by the Philippine Government. The project included road construction, water supply, irrigation, crop and livestock development and social development in the province of Zamboanga del Sur.

• Mary Delahunty (1951–) won two awards for the program Aiding or Abetting from which this clip was taken – the 1983 Gold Walkley Award and the Best TV Current Affairs Report Walkley Award. Delahunty worked as a journalist and presenter for the ABC and commercial television stations. At Four Corners larger budgets and more time allowed the kind of deep inquiry into issues that is the hallmark of good investigative reporting.