This entrepreneur is helping farmers get food to consumers during lockdown

When Cherrie Atilano set out to change the lives of farmers in the Philippines she couldn’t have imagined she would one day be helping to feed people in the nation’s capital, Manila, during a global pandemic.

Agrea, the social enterprise she founded, wants to end rural poverty by helping farmers move from subsistence to small-scale commercial farming. But when the Philippines started to lock down to slow the spread of COVID-19, farmers found their routes to market cut off.

The restrictions meant some could not even go into their fields to pick crops and, although trucks were available, drivers were staying at home. Before Atilano launched her #MoveFoodInitiative, farmers had been forced to dump tonnes of edible food.

Atilano, one of the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Young Global Leaders, decided to use her extensive network to appeal to private truck owners to help ship the food to consumers in towns, villages and the capital.

Feeding key workers

By 26 April, the initiative had shipped almost 138,000kg of fruit and vegetables from almost 4,000 farmers, reaching nearly 30,000 families.

In addition, the project is donating food to eight community kitchens set up to feed frontline medical staff treating people with coronavirus. So far more than 2,000 medics have benefited from free food.

The project has recruited an army of “Movers” who have created impromptu community fresh food markets using locations as diverse as public parks and closed restaurants. They place bulk orders, which are delivered by the project’s drivers at the end of each week.

The next step is to deliver directly to households, Atilano said in an interview with the ANC news channel. The project also aims to help farmers get access to refrigerated transport. A third of all food shipped in conventional trucks goes bad before it reaches Manila, she said.

Going local

Atilano also plans to encourage the development of urban farms. “It is time to learn how to produce food near to you,” she said. “This is the new normal that we need to prepare for.”

Atilano is not the only entrepreneur helping to get food from farms to urban consumers. Dom Hernandez, Chief Operating Officer of Philippine fast food chain Potato Corner, has set up a scheme to allow farmers in his home province of Benguet to sell directly to consumers.

“This idea was conceived back in 2014,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “But we were able to realize the plan only now due to the quarantine. It was out of necessity.” The fact that Hernandez’s family owns a bus line, which is still running to Manila, helped get it off the ground.

Under the scheme, which has shipped as much as 5,000kg of produce in a single day, customers order through the Bangon Benguet project’s Facebook page and then collect food from the bus company’s city terminal.

The World Economic Forum has set up the COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs, bringing together over 40 leading global organizations to coordinate responses by social entrepreneurs as they work to overcome the impacts of coronavirus.