How a Philippine social enterprise brought help and hope to farmers when they needed it most

Rural Rising aims to revitalise the Philippines’ dismal agricultural sector through fair trade by weeding out unscrupulous middlemen

The group hopes to encourage Filipinos to buy local produce, support the farmers and help secure the country’s food supply chain

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Ace Estrada speaking at a Rural Rising event. Photo: Rural Rising

Published: 3:00pm, 4 Feb 2024

In 2020, Ace and Andie Estrada were walking through a public market in the Philippine city of Baguio when they saw farmers giving away vegetables in perfectly good condition. A torn piece of cardboard, turned into a makeshift sign, read: “Free tomatoes, bring your plastic bag.”

The pandemic was a dire time for many Filipino farmers, already struggling with the challenges of inflation and market disruption. Covid-19 restrictions meant fewer people visited Baguio, a mountainous town in Benguet province, including traders from Manila who would normally buy produce harvested from neighbouring towns to sell back in the capital.

Without that demand, many farmers were forced to give their crops away or leave them rotting in their backyards.

Colourful buildings and houses on the mountainous hills of Baguio in the Philippines. Photo: Shutterstock

“In Baguio and Benguet now, you can drive a pickup truck to the public markets and load up on free produce. As much as you want or as much as your conscience would allow you to take … We should all be smiling, but everyone is not. This situation speaks so much about the total disruption that’s happened to the supply chain,” Ace Estrada wrote in a Facebook post that became shared some 6,000 times.

Encouraged by the response, the Estradas, who are tech education and e-commerce entrepreneurs, saw a way to link farmers directly to consumers by cutting out the middlemen who would usually price down the rates they offered farmers.

They gathered the farmers’ produce and managed to sell three tons. Within a month, they rescued 20 tons of vegetables from distressed farmers in Benguet. What went unsold was donated to various community pantries around Metro Manila to help families affected by the pandemic.

The Estradas named their online community Rural Rising. They began conducting regular rescue buys from small-scale farmers at above-market gate prices and selling them to members of their online community at affordable rates, eliminating the middlemen that often caused retail prices to spike.