Apl.de.ap’s bold step for Filipino farmers: rebuilding land, life, and hope

Amid storms and shifting climates, the Filipino artist plants something deeper than hope.

The Philippines has barely recovered from one storm when another arrives. In the news, the language never changes: torrential rains, widespread flooding, thousands displaced. But behind the reports are the same images that never seem to fade: fields washed out, roads swallowed by mud, and farmers rebuilding with their hands, again and again.

For Apl.de.ap, the storms are not just headlines. They are a reminder of where he came from and what still needs to be rebuilt.

The Black Eyed Peas rapper and producer, born Allan Pineda Lindo in Pampanga, has spent the past few years looking inward, back toward the soil that raised him. While the rest of the world still knows him for “Where Is the Love?” or “Bebot,” Apl’s most recent work has been quieter, slower, and, perhaps, more urgent: helping farmers reimagine their future.

Plant, grow, rebuild

“When systems fail,” he wrote in a GMA News column last week, “we don’t wait for rescue. We plant. We grow. We rebuild from the soil up.”

It’s not a metaphor. Through his Apl.de.ap Foundation, he’s been working with the Philippine Coconut Authority and climate venture studio Omtse Ventures to launch the Integrated Rural Enterprise and Regenerative Agroforestry Programme, a mouthful of a name for something simple and profound: food forests.

These are living ecosystems where coconut trees grow alongside cacao, moringa, and coffee, designed to fight erosion, store carbon, and bring back life to exhausted farmlands. In places like Laguna and Palawan, farmers are learning to see their land not as production lines but as breathing systems, climate infrastructure made of roots and leaves.

“I used to think infrastructure meant roads and buildings,” Apl says. “Now, I think of soil and shade, of the things that keep us alive for a long time.”

At Esmeris Farm in Laguna, one of the pilot sites, Apl spends time with smallholder farmers, walking rows of coconut and moringa, listening more than he speaks. It’s a long way from the stadiums of Rio or Las Vegas, but the energy is the same: collaboration, rhythm, creation. “Farmers are the real rockstars,” he says in an interview with GMA News. “They feed us, protect the soil, and carry the future in their hands.”

Farmers, real rockstars

The work is both symbolic and personal. Apl grew up around farmers; his grandfather taught him to plant corn and sweet potato and to cook over a wood fire in a hut surrounded by fields. His mother, Cristina, spent two decades as a domestic worker in Hong Kong to support the family. Now, he says, helping farmers is how he honors that lineage, not just through charity, but through systems that last.

When he speaks about food forests, there’s the same cadence he uses when talking about beats or verses, an artist’s sense of timing applied to the earth. “Monocropping creates a graveyard,” he told the South China Morning Post. “But when you plant different things together, nature breathes again.”

It’s not hard to see why this matters now. Each new typhoon season brings the same cycle of loss: crops destroyed, supply chains broken, and families displaced. Yet Apl’s approach is not to lament but to plant, literally, the next system. “The Philippines sits at the heart of the climate crisis,” he wrote. “But it can also sit at the heart of the solution.”

A wellness retreat

That sense of reclamation runs through his music, too. From “The Apl Song” to “Bebot,” his work has always been about remembering. “Like land for farming, rivers for fishing,” he once rapped, “everyone helping each other whenever they can.” The same ethos, of bayanihan, of roots and renewal, now guides his climate work.

When asked recently what drives him after all these years, he smiled. “It’s in my blood,” he said. “I’ve seen systems fail, but I’ve also seen people build again, together.”

At his farm in Pampanga, surrounded by mango trees and calamansi, the air hums with the sounds of dogs, pigs, and chickens. It’s quiet here,  the kind of quiet that feels alive. Soon, he plans to build a wellness retreat nearby, where guests can eat what they harvest, practice yoga, and reconnect with the land. It’s another way of growing… not fame, not fortune, but balance.

The storms will keep coming. But Apl.de.ap has already found his answer. Not in the noise of the world, but in the steady rhythm of things that grow back. 

“Hope isn’t spoken,” he says. “It’s built.”

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