TYPHOON FRANK merely accelerated the spiral of the food crisis. Disaster has been in our midst with the one named Gloria at its center wind.

The good news though is that Iloilo does not lack for people of vision who stand out during calamities. The bad news: it also does not lack for clowns like Mayor Jerry Treñas who’s humoring us again with his cute face grinning from ear-to-ear splashed on tarpaulins hung all over Iloilo City that scream “Bangon Iloilo, Masarangan Ta Ini” (Rise Up Iloilo, We Shall Overcome).

He humored us the past two years by littering streets and alleys with traffic signs dishing out all sorts of admonitions with “Mayor Jerry P. Treñas” printed in bold letters below them. It’s funny: the signs bearing his name undermine road safety; his grin tells us we are in a party, not calamity.

The NFA regional bodega at Quintin Salas, Jaro, Iloilo City, lost 200,000 bags to the floods and the government’s cereal trading arm sees shortage ahead.

The crisis reminds us of Vice Gov. Demy Sonza, public servant, academician and historian. Sometime in 1999 at the Central Elementary School of Oton, he spoke of Gen. Adriano Hernandez, during the launching of the vegetable project of mothers that got funds through SP Nenita Silla, (bless her soul), chair of the committees on family, women and education.

Sonza is an apostle of the Ilonggo revolucionario who rose to the cabinet. He told Oton mothers that it was mainly the Filipino woman who saved the country from hunger and malnutrition by answering the call of General Hernandez, head the Bureau of Agriculture in the 1900s. After WWI, cholera swept the Philippines; hunger stalked the land. Calamities wrecked farms; the tables of Filipinos were empty.

Hernandez, narrates Sonza, launched an emergency to complement long-term programs by mobilizing women into backyard or small-scale gardening. The mothers planted leafy vegetables, beans, root crops and bananas, among others. As result their kids had ample diet of energy, protein, vitamins and minerals in a matter of weeks. The mobilizaation averted a national disaster.

Hernandez was also responsible for the construction of dams in San Miguel, Mina and Dingle towns that still exist today, and which propelled Iloilo to the country’s top five rice granaries, and a dairy farm with pasteurizing plant in Pavia, the first in Iloilo.

Frank invites us to learn from Hernandez – harness our people for emergency production to grow short term food crops. Rice prices continue soaring away from the reach of Filipinos. However, the country does not lack for cheap energy and protein sources that grow in shorter periods.

In Hernandez’s time, rice took six months to grow. Today, it is only four months but the wait is still long.

Barotac Viejo Mayor Raul “Boboy” Tupas shows us one. He has set up model farms that integrate rice farming with vegetables and fruit trees. Their farms now have patches of leafy vegetables, dagmay, ubi, aerial yams, balunggay (rich source in protein, energy, vitamins and minerals especially iron) and livestock aside from long term crops like industrial and fruit trees.

NFA is in panic and seeks to import more rice. It apparently forgets to ask us to go back to the time of General Hernandez and replicate his feat, this time around, unleashing millions of our human resources for emergency food production.

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