 I was preparing to come to Warsaw to share the Philippine experience in collectively empowering the young farmers' smallholders. When last Friday, Tsai Foon Haiyan, the strongest Tsai Foon ever, hit my country. Tsai Foon Haiyan killed many of my fellow men and left survivors hungry, homeless, and without harvest. When the storm surge and the direct relief stages subsided, we have to question who has what capacities for recovery. Tsai Foons do not discriminate between farmers and non-farmers. They do, however, discriminate between one economic status to another. A 300 km per hour Tsai Foon is only the same to everybody in a sense of meteorological perspective. But in any other perspective, Tsai Foons hit rich and poor differently. It widens the gap between the rich and the poor. The rich have more and better opportunities to recover. They have money in the banks, they have safe investments, and most likely they have friends and relatives who are also very wealthy. But the poor, they have nothing. No cash in bank, their investments like poultry, fruit trees, they have all been blown away, and most likely their families and friends are also homeless and without livelihoods. The reality is that our country's poor has no means to protect themselves from disasters and no means to cope with it. But this does not only happen in the Philippines, of course, but now we are expecting this to always happen unpredictably. So now we ask, how do we build on our resilience? How do we ensure we young people, how do we ensure that there is sustainable investment for our future? More than half of the Filipino population resides in the countryside where most of the country's poor are concentrated. More than half of the labor force are involved, more than one third of the labor force are involved in agriculture. But the Philippine society is very feudalistic. Landlessness is a major cause of poverty. Lands are concentrated to the hands of a very few families, very few influential and powerful families. Most Filipinos are landless, and the youth are almost always landless. Land reform is mandated in our constitution, which means that farm workers can apply for a piece of land of their own. This is a very good social justice program, but it is inefficient due to bureaucracy and corruption. For young Filipinos, living in the countryside does not hold a bright future. Most of them have low levels of education because they were forced to work at pre-adulthood, or they ended up as dropouts, because they are very pressured with too much responsibilities and balancing off responsibilities at work and at home. Without land and without education, their problems just grow exponentially. I am a member of a peasant federation called Task Force Mapalad. Task Force Mapalad is a membership federation of farmers, farm workers, plantation workers, and indigenous peoples in 11 provinces in the Philippines. Currently our membership is about 3,000, men and women, old and young, but this means about a prospect of 30,000 families for development. Working with this organization, I have witnessed firsthand the bleak future of young Filipinos who have no access to land. They do not have any other opportunities but to work as contractual laborers in big plantations during the harvest season. They are mostly seasonal farm workers, if not jobless. They are involved in agriculture but in oppressive conditions. With no other options for a better income, they are forced to move to the big cities where they are most likely exploited in informal jobs in the service sector, like as garbage collectors, laundry people, house helpers, drivers, and so on. Owning your own piece of land can make a difference. Why? Because it impacts directly on your own household income and it builds self-esteem of the youth. As a contractual farm worker, you can work all day but no matter how long you work, how hard you work, you will not earn one cent more than the fellow next to you. Young farmers who own a piece of land is entirely different. They have their own land, they decide what crops to plant, they harvest what they plant, they decide what to do with their harvest and they can decide for their own value-adding activities. I have witnessed how transformation of socio-economic roles from being a landless farm worker to being a land manager has enabled young farmers to collectively address the food security of their communities. To raise their household income, gain access to education and health care. However, we cannot merely depend on our government to give us what we want. We have to take ownership of our own problems. Task Force Mopalad supports claims for land of young farmers through paralegal trainings, negotiator and speakers trainings. With these trainings, farmers to be empowered to deal with the government and other sectors to bring for their issues in their communities, especially with regards to human rights violence and in action of the government to their land claims. Legal and moral legitimacy of their land claims has also resulted to successful accessing of land even in the most contentious properties owned by big politicians in Philippines. Having your own piece of land, though, is not enough to build your livelihood. Working in the field is one thing, but managing your farm is entirely different. For those who have successfully owned the land, it is necessary to raise their capacities to improve their crop yields so that they can engage better markets and eventually increase their income that would make their resilience stronger. Also, Task Force Mopalad are offering access to productivity trainings like farm diversification, sustainable technologies, integrated pest management. We are functioning like a platform. We connect young people to the government so that they can access extension work. We also connect them to agriculture and technology schools so that they can access technology support. But aside from being a farmer, a land owner also needs to be a business person. That's why we support the farmers in developing their entrepreneurial skills. Our members take part in capacity building. They do research and campaigns. They build their own small-scale businesses. They improve their capacities to directly engage with the markets and also with the private sector, which may have specific demands for volume standards, quality standards, and cost standards. By doing so, they make their cooperatives stronger and more able to do businesses. As an organized group, we have been encouraging young people to establish their own producers' enterprises, their own organizations, so that they can have collective bargaining position, sustainable image and track record in accessing finance, for example. The youth become adept in business planning. Seeing the results, they become very enthusiastic about having the opportunity to increase their capabilities to become better enterprise managers. The population of the Filipino farmers is aging. The average Filipino farmer's age is about 55 to 59. Even though 60% of the young people from age 5 to 7 are involved in agriculture, there are still a big number of young people moving to the urban areas because they have no better options to feed their families. As such, I'm not saying that the service sector is bad. Even more if it is a positive choice. But how do we give our youth the liberty of choice? Our approach of collectively empowering the youth through interlinking land tenure improvement, productivity improvement and enterprise development gives those who have no other options a sustainable means to fend for their families and to have greater chances of surviving in times of calamities, a chance to cope with disasters, to survive with human dignity and thereby build up their resilience in times when Taifun Haiyan strike in our country. Thank you.