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In the Philippines, a growing population means the country can't feed itself anymore. And that leaves it with two options: Increase supply or try to do something about demand. Sam Eaton reports.

This story also appeared on PBS NEWSHOUR. A related story can be found on American Public Media's Marketplace.

The Philippines’ swelling population is causing fishing villages to embrace birth control for the first time, and not just as a means to plan their families. They also see it as a path to long-term food security, ensuring that future generations enjoy the same abundance of fish.

TRANSCRIPT

Reporter Sam Eaton: The Danajon Double Barrier Reef off of Bohol Island in the southern Philippines is one of the richest marine biodiversity hot spots in the world. 

But just a short boat ride away, more than a million people depend on these fishing grounds for their food and livelihoods. Rice may be the staple food of the Philippines, but fish provide most of the protein in daily diets. And as the population of communities like this one soar, nearly tripling in the last three decades, the effect on the reef has been devastating. Fishermen are resorting to extreme tactics to boost their declining catch.

Nazario Avenido: We capture one boat this morning.

Eaton: Nazario Avenido and his group of volunteers operate 24-hour patrols, trying to protect their local fishing grounds. Illegal fishing has become rampant.  Many use dynamite or cyanide, indiscriminately killing everything within their reach. Avenido has confiscated more than 50 boats and hundreds of illegal nets in recent years.

Today, he seized this boat. Its owner, who escaped capture, was using a banned net that wreaks havoc on spawning grounds and sensitive corals. Avenido says the violators aren’t bad people. They’re just hungry.

Avenido: Because there is no other solution, especially when they are very poor family.

Eaton: Poor, in a country that has one of the highest population growth rates in all of Southeast Asia, every year adding about 2 million more mouths to feed.

Walden Bello: It’s a hell of a problem. I think you just need to look at the statistics.

Eaton: Congressman Walden Bello says the Philippines is already beyond its carrying capacity. And that’s today, with a population just shy of 100 million people.

Bello: And so the demographers are really worried because they feel that most likely, at the earliest, we’ll be stabilizing at 200 million in 2080.

Eaton: That eventual doubling of the population presents an existential threat to the Philippines, especially for the people who depend on its natural resources for food. 

I traveled to a rural fishing village, called Humayhumay, to see how the issues of population growth, food and the environment are connected. And what I found was surprising. 

Jason Bostero and his wife, Crisna, both grew up in large families typical of this area. But unlike the generations before them, the Bosteros made a deliberate choice to have only two children: James and Cyril Jean, ages 6 and 9. 

Jason Bostero: My income is just right to feed us three times a day. It’s really, really different when you have a small family.

Eaton: That choice to have a smaller family was motivated by memories of going hungry as young children. 

Crisna Bostero: In my case, we were really hard up before. Sometimes, we would only eat once a day because we were so poor. We couldn’t go to school. I did not finish my school because there were just so many of us. 

Eaton: The reason the Bosteros were able to have a smaller family is because they could choose to. A community-based family planning program has made birth control options like the pill accessible and affordable – at about 70 cents a month ­– for the first time in their village.

Joan Castro: In villages, we train and identify community-based distributors like this to be able to sell pills and condoms anytime.

Eaton: Dr. Joan Castro started the program here. 

Castro: And this becomes as easy as buying soft drinks or matches.

Eaton: She’s with the PATH Foundation Philippines, a group funded mostly through USAID. What makes her program unique is its emphasis on local partners.

Castro (talking with storeowner): Which brand of birth control pills are you selling more of?

Storeowner: They like the yellow one because it’s cheaper.

Castro (talking with storeowner): How much is it?

Castro: The idea is to be able to bring access to the people.

Eaton: Access that in remote villages like Humayhumay was nonexistent before the PATH Foundation came in. In just six years since the program was first established here, family sizes have plummeted from as many as 12 children to a maximum of about four today.

This village is one of the PATH Foundation’s longest-running case studies. And what it’s showing is how closely tied family planning is with environmental conservation and putting food on the table.

Out on the Danajon Double Barrier Reef, where Jason Bostero fishes every morning, the shift to smaller families is already paying dividends. He and his neighbors have created a marine preserve to help revive fish stocks. And it’s working. With smaller families, thinking about future generations is a luxury fishermen like Bostero can afford.

Jason Bostero: Family planning is helpful because if you control the number of your children, you don’t need as many fish to support your family. If you have many children, it’s difficult to support them.

Eaton: Outside of Humayhumay, where birth control remains largely out of reach, the struggle to put food on the table from one day to the next dominates life.

Down the road, the gymnasium in the region’s main town, Ubay, was filled recently with people waiting to collect government assistance checks for food. Many stood in line for up to 12 hours. 

Man on microphone: Let’s be quick because we don’t have enough time ...

Eaton: For the families gathered here, these checks are a lifeline, making up for the declining catch from the sea.

This scene is one that neighboring countrieslike Thailand and Indonesia have largely avoided, thanks to state-sponsored family planning programs. But Congressman Walden Bello says in the Philippines, any efforts to do the same have faced stiff resistance.

Bello: What’s happening is a hard-line, scorched-earth opposition on the part of the Catholic church hierarchy to any form of artificial contraception.

Eaton: And in a country that’s 80 percent Catholic, that opposition means something. For more than a decade, the church’s leadership has rallied against a reproductive health bill in Congress that would guarantee universal access to birth control. Recently, it even threatened the president with excommunication for supporting the bill.

Oscar Cruz: That’s why I say, “Don’t fool with the church.” Because she will bury you.

Eaton: Filipino Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz says the key to everyone having enough food to eat is a question of development, not population control.

Cruz: Once, I was asked, “Which would you prefer: to have less mouths to feed or to have more food to eat?” And I said, “Is there a choice there?” (I think the more practical and immediate answer is that) come on, if you have more mouths to feed, then produce more food to eat! Not the other way around.

Eaton: But that challenge, to produce more food, is already testing the limits of ecosystems, both on land and sea. Today, the Philippines imports more rice than any other nation on the planet. And according to the World Bank, every major species of fish here shows signs of severe overfishing. Technological advances have helped boost the food supply, but they’ve failed to keep pace with the Philippine’s surging population growth. 

Maternity wards like this one, at a Manila hospital, are overwhelmed. Dr. Esmeraldo Ilem heads the hospital’s family planning unit, but spends most of his time these days with new mothers.

Esmeraldo Ilem: She’s only 29 years old. This is her seventh child.

Eaton: According to the Guttmacher Institute, more than half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unintended. It’s the poor who come here for maternity care.  But if they want to prevent pregnancies, they’re out of luck. Absent any state funding for birth control, Dr. Ilem has little to offer.

That’s a stark contrast to the Bohol Island fishing village, Humayhumay, where family planning is as close as the corner store. Here, the PATH Foundation Philippines program has taken on a life of its own. The project is now fully integrated with the local government’s rural health unit. 

Castro: The vision of the project is in this community. You see more children who are able to become leaders and speak out for themselves in the future and be able to become stewards of their own sexuality and the future of the environment. This is the legacy.

Eaton: Dr. Castro says success stories like this one can help overcome traditional attitudes about birth control. Jason and Crisna Bostero, both practicing Catholics, don’t see a conflict between their religious beliefs and family planning. For them, it’s about something much more immediate, like what kind of future they’re going to pass on to their two children.

Crisna Bostero: I don’t want them to be like us, just to fish the sea, just to farm the land. This is not an easy way to earn a living. You are exposed to the sun.  It’s better if they can finish their courses so they can have comfortable lives.

Eaton: With both of their children in school, the Bosteros are hopeful about their future. But it’s a future that could easily be overwhelmed by outside forces. After all, this is only one village in a country still deadlocked over a family planning law, in a world that’s projected to have 9 billion mouths to feed by the middle of the century.

Reporter/Producer: Sam Eaton
Camera: Sam Eaton
Editor: Charlotte Buchen
Local fixer: Carlos Conde
Additional field translation: Mercy Butawan
Consulting Producer: Stephen Talbot
Series producer: Cassandra Herrman
Executive producer, Food for 9 Billion: Sharon Tiller

This story also ran in the Washington Post.

An intelligence contract employee with Immigration and Customs Enforcement faces a charge of embezzling more than $54,000, the third defendant in an expanding probe of a travel voucher kickback scheme.

Stephen E. Henderson, 61, of Asheville, N.C., is scheduled to appear Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington for an arraignment and plea agreement hearing stemming from a conversion-of-public-money charge.

Henderson, a senior lead intelligence analyst with the agency’s Office of Intelligence, declined to comment when reached by phone.

William Jackson Garber, Henderson’s attorney, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Henderson allegedly filed fake expense reimbursement claims from about July 2008 to October 2010, with the help of two unnamed ICE employees, the charging document shows. The other two employees were a supervisor and the supervisor’s assistant.

Henderson is the second ICE intelligence employee charged in the past month and the third within a year as part of the scheme. Prosecutors are also seeking a judgment of $54,387.62 against Henderson. The amount of money allegedly stolen by the three defendants exceeds $221,000, records show.

The first of three defendants, Ahmed Abdil Abdallat, is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday in Federal District Court in western Texas. A former intelligence analyst in El Paso, Abdallat admitted in October that he submitted fraudulent travel vouchers totaling $116,392.84 between February 2009 and September 2010, court records show. Prosecutors are seeking a monetary judgment against Abdallat. He also faces up to 10 years in prison.

A second defendant, William J. Korn, pleaded guilty last month to defrauding the government of more than $50,000 in a similar scheme. Korn admitted that he worked with an unnamed supervisor in his chain of command and the supervisor’s unnamed assistant to submit fake travel voucher claims. A sentencing date has not been set for Korn. He faces up to a year in prison and a possible fine of as much as $20,000.

The federal probe, investigated by the FBI, the Homeland Security Department’s Inspector General’s office and ICE, involves at least two other former employees, among them a former acting intelligence chief, James M. Woosley, and his assistant, Leticia Rollerson, according to court testimony.

Woosley and Rollerson resigned from their Washington-based jobs within weeks of each other last year. Neither has been arrested or charged. They could not be reached for comment.

Woosley’s domestic assignments included posts in Washington, El Paso, Los Angeles, Tucson and Phoenix, according to his biography, which was removed early last year from the agency’s Web site. Before his June 2009 appointment as acting intelligence chief, Woosley directed the agency’s Arizona field intelligence group in Tucson.

Henderson’s official duty station was Tucson until Aug. 26, 2009, when his company changed his assignment to Fairfax, according to the court document. Henderson lived in a rental house in Tucson that belonged to the unnamed ICE supervisor. The supervisor and his assistant lived in Virginia and were based in Washington.

William Miller, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, declined to comment on the ongoing investigation.

This story also appeared on America Public Media's Marketplace.

Kai Ryssdal: There are now, the United Nations tells us, seven billion people on the planet. Sooner rather than later -- another 30, 35 years or so -- there's going to be more than nine billion. That's a whole lot of mouths to feed.

So today we're starting a year-long series about the global food system, and how we're going to feed those nine billion people -- if we're going to be able to feed 'em at all.

We start at dinner.

You can think of the world's food system as a giant potluck dinner.

Woman: Hello, come in!

Ryssdal: The first thing that strikes you is the abundance. There's a huge table, it's piled with food. And the smells --

Man: Magnifico!

Ryssdal: Wow, what is that?

Woman: It's goat stew. Try some!

Ryssdal: Fifty years ago, people were eating a lot less on average, especially meat.

Man: Have a hamburger. It's delicious.

Ryssdal: Back in the '60s and '70s, about a billion people -- one in every three human beings -- were hungry. Millions of people were dying in famines in China, Africa, Bangladesh. People worried there was no way to keep up with an exploding population.

But then came the Green Revolution. And over the course of just a couple of decades, global food production skyrocketed. Famines are now actually pretty rare. We're producing more food, and we're better at dealing with emergencies.

But even with that, things aren't exactly working. Down at this end of the room, there's a family sitting on the floor with a few grains of something, looks like millet. The number of chronically hungry people in the world is still around a billion. Granted that's one in seven of us -- not one in three -- but still, it's a lot.

And clearly something's out of whack, because there are also about a billion obese people worldwide. Actually, a lot of things are out of whack.

Back here in the kitchen, the water system's all messed up -- there's too much in some places, not enough in others. There's a big pile of rotting -- something -- over there, and man, it's getting hot. And crowded, too. There's hardly any room to move.

Here comes another busload of people -- and they look hungry, too.

Ryssdal: A question you might draw from such a scene setter is: Now what the heck do we do? More than nine billion people. So over the course of the next year, in collaboration with Homelands Productions and PBS NewsHour, we'll be looking at what we have do now to be able feed ourselves in the future.

Maybe one place to start is science. Can't we just research and develop our way out of this? It's worked before. Here's Jon Miller.

Reporter Jon Miller: I figured Mexico was a good place to go to take a look into the scientific pipeline. This is where farmers thousands of years ago transformed a grass called teosinte into what we now know as corn. It's also where scientists in the 1950s and'60s developed the semi-dwarf wheat varieties that launched the Green Revolution.

My first stop is where a lot of that work was done, at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center outside Mexico City. I'm here watching technicians clean and sort experimental corn seeds to go out around the world. I ask research director Marianne Bänziger if there's some big game-changer on the horizon. She says, basically, forget about it.

Marianne Bänziger: It is not just one solution. I mean, our action plans are 10 approaches. And the 10 approaches are not just breeding, they're about really looking at the whole livelihood of a farm family.

Reporter: So the idea isn't just to increase the total amount of food the world produces. It's also to make life better for the two billion or so people who depend on farming for their food and livelihood. Because ironically, most of the world's poorest and hungriest people are in the food production business. If they can produce more, the thinking goes, everybody benefits.

Bänziger says for most crops, a good place to start is by closing what's known as the "yield gap." That's the difference between what farmers could be producing, using existing technology, and what they actually do produce.

Bänziger: In Africa, under the best conditions, you can get 10 times more yield than what farmers get today. On average, I would say in Africa we can increase production four or five times.

Reporter: In Asia and Latin America, she figures output could double. Actually realizing those gains -- well, that's the challenge.

People speaking Spanish: Buenos días, hola, hola. Porfirio Bastida para servirles.

Reporter: I go on a little field trip to see Porfirio Bastida, who farms just over an acre of corn near the Mexico City airport. The city's been creeping closer and closer, sucking up water and land.

People speaking Spanish: Esta bien. Buenos días. Pasenle!

Reporter: For the last three years, Bastida has been practicing what's known as "conservation agriculture" -- he doesn't plow and he doesn't hoe and he lets the stalks and leaves of the corn plants stay in the field after harvest. American farmers have been doing this for decades to control erosion, but here it's a pretty radical departure from the way people normally farm.

Porfirio Bastida: Mire, en primer lugar, hemos visto que, pues, ya no tenemos suficiente agua.

Interpreter: Yeah, so basically Porfirio is saying that they decided to use conservation agriculture because they don't have much water available for their crops. When they keep all the organic material on the soil, that helps the field to retain humidity.

Reporter: Bastida says he's using much less water now, and he's harvesting twice as much corn. Plus it's less work. Still, of all the farmers in this area, so far only he and his wife have adopted the method. Take-home message: It takes time for new things to catch on.

I spend the next day tromping around cornfields with Fernando Castillo, a Mexican geneticist who teaches at a nearby university.

Fernando Castillo: Que es lo que más le interesería?

Farmer: Primero las plagas.

Reporter: Working with a tiny budget, he helps local farmers improve the way they select the corn they'll save for planting the next season. These are traditional varieties, not hybrids or GMOs, and since Mexico is where corn comes from, there's lots of genetic diversity in any given field. Castillo says with a little tutoring, Mexico's 2.8 million corn farmers can accomplish much more than a few plant breeders with Ph.Ds.

Castillo: Farmers have worked for years, and they have learned from their parents and grandparents the local conditions and the management. So most of it is based on local knowledge and local resources.

Reporter: Castillo says the process could raise Mexican corn yields by 2 percent per year, which is just about what's needed to keep up with the demand. But he's been at this for 15 years, and he's still just working with a handful of farmers.

Around the world, thousands of scientists are hacking away at thousands of problems. Some are experimenting with "agro-ecological" methods -- mixing different crops and trees and animals to diversify diets and reduce the need for chemical fertilizers. Others are trying to breed crops that resist insects or diseases, or that tolerate flooding or drought. Some of this stuff is pretty ambitious.

Matthew Reynolds: This field contains the first experiment of the wheat yield consortium in Mexico.

Reporter: Matthew Reynolds is a wheat specialist at the maize and wheat center. He's heading a global push to make wheat plants much more efficient at converting sunlight into grain. There's a parallel effort going on in rice.

Reynolds: This is actually a very interesting area, the spike photosynthesis, because no one has ever systematically tried to improve this photosynthesis of the spikes.

Reporter: It's not just about the spikes -- those are the parts of the plants with the seeds on them -- it's about fundamentally changing the way the plant works. Reynolds says the research will take 20 or 30 years to bear fruit -- if it bears fruit at all. But it could increase wheat yields by 50 percent.

Reynolds: So what are the odds? The answer to that question is more: What are the consequences if we fail?

Reporter: But no one is really counting on the project succeeding -- there are just too many scientific uncertainties. So the strategy for now is to keep working on as many fronts as possible.

With climate change, and another two or three billion people coming, I ask Marianne Bänziger if it'll be enough.

Bänziger: We can feed the world in 2050. Maize is the livelihood for 900 million poor people. Wheat feeds more than 1.2 billion poor people. So it is a little bit absurd to think that the resources are not there. They are there.

Reporter: Still, everyone I talk to here says no matter how generous the funding, no matter how good the science, it won't make a difference if government policies aren't right. That means fair prices for farmers and help when crops fail. It means access to land and roads and warehouses and markets. It means education and nutrition programs and family planning.

But you can't just wait for all those things and then call in the scientists. Because if there's one resource scientists need more than anything, it's time.

In Texcoco, Mexico, I'm Jon Miller for Marketplace.

Ryssdal: Food for 9 Billion is a collaboration between Marketplace, Homelands Productions, PBS NewsHour and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

This story also appeared on America Public Media's Marketplace.

Kai Ryssdal: The famine in East Africa -- if this is even possible to believe -- has taken a turn for the worst. The United Nations says tens of thousands of people have already died from starvation. And now, rains are falling and cholera has turned up in refugee camps. It has people living on the equivalent of one plate of rice a day.

The United Nations says there are going to be nine billion people on the planet by the year 2045. And so our series, Food for 9 Billion, answers the very basic question of how we're going to feed them all.

Here's one clue: Famine's a lot more than simply a drought.

Scott Tong reports from the Horn of Africa.

Reporter Scott Tong: This is a tale of two droughts.

Actually, it's just one weather pattern, in one dirt-poor part of the world. But there's a border. On the Ethiopia side, the farmers and the herders manage to endure. Whereas Somalia -- by now you've heard about the famine.

Abdi Samatar, University of Minnesota: It was as if the skin of their bodies was sticking to their bones. Inhumanly grotesque.

Sadia Ali Aden, Adar Foundation: No toilets, no clean water. The kids were half-naked.

Tony Burns, Saacid aid agency: You can go to virtually any family, living under a piece of plastic, and they will tell you they've lost one, two, three or four children.

Reporter: How did famine happen? I stopped first at the biggest refugee camp on earth. 460,000 Somalis -- that's the size of Kansas City -- live in Kenya, off U.N. rations of corn, wheat, cooking oil.

Thirty-five-year-old Mahmoud Abdurahman just came.

Mahmoud Abdurahman: We had no rains, no water to farm. So we ran away.

Reporter: He walked 30 days to get out of Somalia.

Abdurahman: We had to leave some people behind who got too weak. They were still alive then. But people who came afterward told us they saw dead bodies being eaten by hyenas. One of the bodies was my neighbor. It's terrible.

Reporter: Abdurahman feels lucky because he has a donkey. It pulled the cart carrying his four children.

Abdurahman: But when we came, we lost one child to starvation -- our second daughter. She was one and a half.

Reporter: Here, everyone talks of the worst drought in two generations. But here's the thing: Other places have drought, too -- Algeria, Peru, Texas -- but no starvation.

Andrew Natsios at Georgetown used to run the Agency for International Development.

Andrew Natsios: In very few places do people starve to death simply because there is a drought. The only time people really actually die is when there is some political complication.

Reporter: "Complication" is a charitable word for Somalia. It's had no central government in 20 years. There's been internal conflict, there's been outside meddling -- from the Soviets, from the Americans, from the Ethiopians, now the Kenyans.

Out of the mess arose the Muslim extremist group. Al-Shabaab is known for radical theology, and guns. And blocking food aid.

Natsios: The Al-Shabaab movement does not want any food aid distributed because they see it as undermining their authority and legitimacy.

Reporter: Western aid competes for influence. Natsios says after an earthquake in Pakistan, U.S. help rushed in. American popularity rose; Al-Qaeda's fell.

Natsios: Bin Laden was really, really upset, apparently from what the agency told me, the CIA.

Reporter: It seems every Somali here has an Al-Shabaab tale. I come upon to a dusty food stall, with a radio that must be older than I am. Refugee Abdu Shan Ali owns the stall.

Abdu Shan Ali: The gunmen just came and stole my animals. They chose the fattest goats, cows and camels.

Reporter: He fled Somalia two years ago, in search of help for his wife and his 10 kids. They all stayed behind.

Shan Ali: I don't know if they're alive or dead. I ask everyone who comes if they know anything about my family.

Reporter: He asks to change the subject, puts a couple tomatoes on the scale.

Now the difference between drought and famine starts to come into focus. Imagine it's you: By fate, you're born into the world's poorest place. Drought comes, crops fail, food prices triple. You eat everything you have, including your seeds. Your cows and goats provide milk. But the drought kills half of them, and then gunmen come and take the rest. So you're left with two choices: flee for a refugee camp, or wait to die.

Now, the other side of the river. Same desert climate, same 105 degree heat, same drought -- different planet. This the sound of government safety net. Ethiopian men chant "we work for survive" as they dig irrigation trenches. In return, they get food and access to water.

Fifty-eight-year-old Hisak Ali Hassan.

Hisak Ali Hassan: Now we can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. Before we only ate two times a day. We don't eat meat, but we get vegetables. And we can go into town to buy rice.

Reporter: Now this is Ethiopia. Remember the famine back in the '80s? Those Live Aid benefit concerts?

Back then, Ethiopia faced what Somalia faces now -- drought and civil war. Famine then came in part because Ethiopian leaders picked military supplies over food aid -- guns over butter.

Getachew Reda: This is a country which has been a poster child for poverty and hunger.

Reporter: Ethiopian foreign ministry spokesman Getachew Reda was in grade school during that famine. He recalls a beggar came up and snatched a loaf of bread out of his hands, at which point his grandmother screamed "shame on you" at the beggar. The beggar shouted back: "Shame on you, for giving a child enough food for 10."

Getachew: I have still vivid pictures of people really starving, begging. You know, that kind of thing is a thing of the past. And I think we have come to bury that past.

Reporter: Ethiopia -- like many African countries -- has gradually built a series of shock absorbers for droughts. It stores water and grain around the country for emergencies. It gives farmers better seeds, and insurance for when crops fail. It's built roads to help people get to market.

The point is to weave a safety net, and to lift incomes so enough people won't ever need the net.

Economist John Hoddinott is with the International Food Policy Research Institute.

John Hoddinott: What we do know in countries which have successfully escaped hunger and famine is that they've done a whole lot of things right. And when you push on all those fronts, that's when you see famine and hunger disappearing.

Reporter: Meantime in Somalia, seasonal rains have come, raising hopes for the January harvest for the farmers who are still there.

And yet in the refugee camps, the next deadly stage of the disaster has already shown up: water-borne diseases like cholera and malaria.

In East Africa, I'm Scott Tong for Marketplace.