Nourishing justice: rural women reclaim food, land, and community at Pakigduyog food fest
DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 03 December) — In the uplands where mornings break slowly over gardens, fields, and riverbanks, food is rarely just food. It is seed, memory, labor, and lineage. It is also testimony of who toils, who decides, and who eats last.
At the 3rd Pakigduyog Food Festival organized by the Metsa Foundation on November 28 at the Imulayan Organic Resource Center here, food became something more: a call to end violence against women, a demand to uproot injustice by nourishing collective power.
This year’s celebration unfolded under the theme “Nourishing Justice: Ending Gender-Based Malnutrition and Hunger as Manifestations of Violence Against Women,” aligning the festival with the national 18-Day Campaign to End Violence Against Women (VAW). It was not a typical festival of delicacies and applause. Instead, it was a gathering of women — indigenous, peasant, rural, young, and elderly — who collectively illuminated the often-invisible labor that keeps households and communities alive.
Beyond bruises: naming the violence embedded in hunger
Violence against women is often imagined only as the visible bruises, blows, and threats. But Pakigduyog sought to expose a deeper, slower violence rooted in patriarchal systems that drain land and women’s lives simultaneously.
In rural communities where resources are contested, environmental extraction is not gender-neutral. When corporate or state forces strip forests, poison waters, and seize ancestral lands, women experience the devastation first: dwindling harvests, empty kitchens, the burden of walking farther for water, and the motherly pain of watching their children sleep hungry. Poverty and hunger are not natural tragedies of the countryside but symptoms of a system that refuses to value women’s labor, knowledge, and dignity.
“Hunger is violence,” declared Anita Morales, Executive Director of the Metsa Foundation. “There is a bigger system that decides who should eat first and who should eat the least. When transnational agri-corporations extract resources from the land, women get the least resources and often end up malnourished and hungry.”
This statement is a clear indictment, of naming the centuries-old injustice carried quietly in the bellies and backs of rural women.
Women – led Markets
In response to this violence, Pakigduyog celebrated resistance through everyday practices of agroecology, communal work, and cultural revival. The festival opened with a vibrant women-led market day, where sustainably and organically grown produce from rural and indigenous women farmers lined the tables.
This market was more than a venue for selling crops. It was a living demonstration of how women-led economies can flourish when intermediaries and exploitative systems are removed. Here, women farmers sold directly to women consumers, forging relationships rooted in solidarity. Moreover, this became an avenue for women to engage in conversations about farming practices, seed varieties, child nutrition, and challenges of land access.
Seeds as memory, seeds as sovereignty
A special corner of the event featured a display of locally saved seeds curated by indigenous women leaders of Kababaehang Nagtataglay ng Bihirang Lakas (KNBL), an independent federation of indigenous and peasant women working toward a future of food sovereignty in the 3rd congressional district of Davao City. These tiny and colorful seeds carried stories of generations of women, each seed holding memories and the deep ties of women to the care of the land. Varieties of upland rice, mung beans, foraged fruits, medicinal herbs, and often-neglected vegetables were arranged, triggering a collective memory long erased by corporate greed.
To the indigenous women who safeguarded them, seeds are more than agricultural inputs. In her speech, Anita Pandian, a Manobo indigenous woman leader and president of KNBL, emphasized how seeds are not just seeds but kin, loved and valued like her own children. They are both inheritance and responsibility. For women seed savers, seeds are a collective belonging of the community.
However, industrial farming and digital convenience have detached communities from their seeds. The presence of genetically modified seeds sold by corporations has replaced those cultivated for generations. Seeds become a patent, a product, an individual property whose intention is profit. Corporate greed resulted in land destruction and the erasure of culture and identity.
The erasure of women’s connection to seeds, alongside environmental plunder, is itself a manifestation of systemic violence that hampers the very right of indigenous women to claim their own personhood.
Reclaiming Communal Spaces: Dismantling the Myth of the “Marites”
In the afternoon, the festival expanded into a lively tapestry of simultaneous communal activities. Beneath the shade of tall trees, women gathered for the traditional wrapping of puso and ibos, laughter was heard as indigenous women leaders taught the participants how to fold strips of coconut leaves into pyramids and tubes.
Nearby, another group handled steaming pots, collectively making the traditional snack called musi and practicing an indigenous way of cooking using only banana leaves. All ingredients came from women farmers, reinforcing the connection between agroecology, cultural heritage, and women’s bodily autonomy.
As the food simmered, conversations flowed freely. Stories of violence surfaced: issues concerning women, how women are denied their truth, and how their collective struggles are dismissed. Women spoke of struggles in their homes, in the fields, and in community institutions. They talked about unequal pay, marital abuse, land dispossession, and the emotional hunger of being silenced.
In many Filipino communities, gatherings of women are often dismissed as idle gossip sessions. Women are branded and degraded as maritesses or women engrossed in gossips who waste time instead of fulfilling duties. This label, is itself a form of violence, a cultural mechanism that ridicules women’s need for solidarity and discourages them from forming support networks.
Pakigduyog challenged this narrative by showing how communal work—cooking together, wrapping together, sharing food and stories—is not idle chatter but a place of resistance. It is in these circles that women begin to articulate what they are denied in public spaces: their truths, their grievances, their dreams.
Pakigduyog: beyond the festival but a growing movement
By sunset, the festival grounds were filled with the aroma of native delicacies, the hum of satisfied conversations, and community dancing. But more than the food, what lingered was the palpable sense of collective strength. Pakigduyog became a space where women could see themselves as leaders of the food system, guardians of biodiversity, and defenders of their communities against the violence of hunger and exclusion.
The 3rd Pakigduyog Food Festival did not end hunger in a day. It did not dismantle patriarchal systems in a single gathering. But by making the narratives of rural women who have fed the nation visible under the system that deliberately made them invisible is already a powerful start. By affirming that justice can be cultivated, resistance can be cooked over shared fires, and that women can own and control their seeds instead of corporations, a radical promise of a future where no one must starve, is carved and made.
In the quiet strength of these women, Pakigduyog reminds us: nourishing justice begins with those who have always nourished us.
(Aene Dom Doloricon Comiling is the current Advocacy Staff and organizer of the Metsa Foundation founded in 1992. The organization has been organizing women farmers among the Bagobo and Manobo tribes, including women in urban areas in the 3rd District of Davao City).
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