Letter to a quixotic friend (part 1)

(I wrote this to a quixotic friend who wants to run as vice-governor of Leyte as an addendum to his motherhood statements that seem so detached from our social realities here. The guy has two masters degrees – one in philosophy and another in business management.)

Government always tries to adopt a positive attitude when it talks about the economy. In its 2004 NEDA report of Leyte’s economy, it says:

“Both positive and negative signals about the economy were eminent during the period. Taking all things together, the economy continued to be productive.”

Still it courageously admits in later sentences:

“ Its growth was however dampened by higher prices, increase in criminality and decline in major outputs in the services sector… business was slow. Financial institutions experienced low deposits and had fewer loans granted to beneficiaries. Livestock and poultry industry was sluggish. “

Moreover, unemployment had increased, so had inflation and crime.

It is difficult to understand this attitude of seeming optimism amidst a clear picture of an impending disaster. That was 2004. Today, the picture can only be far worse in the light of the recent global recession, although we do not have data to support this contention.

I do not want to go into the usual macro economic analysis that government uses, plotting demand and supply figures and finding out if things even up on a bigger scale. I’d like to have a clearer picture of the different sectors and the roles that each play in the entire picture. This for me is the more realistic approach.

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Despite avowals that the province is moving fast into the 21st century with the development of an IT hub in the regional center, I still maintain that Leyte is basically an agricultural country. Its population largely survives on products from their land and the sea, supplementing this with the earnings of family kin who work in factories outside the province, private and public offices, employment with government, and other non-formal jobs in the so-called underground economy.

Other sectors are still minimal, except probably for trade and commerce which are concentrated in the capital city and other large towns. We see an economy that has not fundamentally changed since 50 or 60 years ago, an economy that thrives on rice, corn, coconuts and abaca. We are still selling our desiccated coconuts and raw abaca fiber to processors outside the province, and we have not learned to extensively process these raw materials into finished forms, except maybe produce samples of abaca-made bags and ginit hats. In fact, this is probably the reason why government employment has become a lucrative career and engagement in electoral politics an attractive investment.

Now if 60 to 65 percent of our people are in this sector, I think the focus of development efforts should be here. Before making drastic proposals, let’s try to figure out why our farmers continue to tread on the path of poverty. Except for Ormoc which still remains an hacienda country, the rest of the province do not have large tenurial issues, often pointed out as the kink in agricultural development. Large tenancy issues are practically non-existent in the eastern and central parts of the province. I won’t say that the major issue here is productivity although government technicians and other functionaries like to think so. They measure development using standards of productivity per unit area, so that when a piece of property looks underproductive, their reflex action is to recommend higher farm inputs to remedy the so-called problem.

Government has so conditioned the minds of farmers to producing for the market that they forget that the main reason why farmers are farming is to feed their own families first. This market-driven target has taken precedence over the need for food security. In the present scheme of things, farmers are made to follow certain standards, to buy certain kinds of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, disregarding the costs, the risk on their health, the damage to the soil and the environment or the future of their children. So at the beginning of the planting season, farmers troop to informal money lenders to borrow money to buy farm inputs, and during the harvest season, they troop back to pay their debts and interests, leaving barely enough for their families’ survival. Add in the usual bad habits of lavish spending in the season of plenty and you have a perfect example of a vicious and never-ending cycle of poverty that starts from the moment the farmer is born into this world and stops only when he stops breathing.

For me, this market-driven direction has derailed he farmer from his principal mission, which is to produce food to feed his own family. Now he is producing so that others may eat and profit from him. Note how some palay traders ironically prosper amidst impoverished palay farmers. You know where they get their wealth or who enables them to live their flashy lifestyles.

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The agricultural program of the government, starting with that infamous Green Revolution, is responsible for this malady. Before that, the farmers were better off. They could eat three times a day, have meat on Sundays and even attend Sunday cockpits. Now eating three meals a day is considered miraculous and meat comes as a treat only on fiestas. What we face today is even worse than Green Revolution because even seeds, the hybrid varieties, have to be bought. Farmers can no longer keep on producing the very food that they eat unless they buy its seeds. Worse, they must also buy chemical fertilizers and pesticides otherwise the seeds won’t grow. These conditions have become like heavy chains on the hands and feet of our impoverished farmers. Some 65 percent of Leyte’s population unhappily belong to this sector. If there is any sector that we should focus our development efforts on, this is it.

How? First change the farming framework – from one that is market-driven to one that focuses on food security and self-sustenance, from one that is fueled by harmful chemicals to one that is in harmony with the natural processes, from one that is mono-cropped to one that is diversified, from one that is unsustainable and destructive in the long run to one that is restorative and healthy. I think we should recognize the prerogative of the farmer to produce more than what they can consume so other sectors can eat, but I don’t see that as a problem because since time immemorial, farmers always tended to produce more than what they could consume so that they could buy or trade something else from their surplus. This market-driven orientation is just a concoction of our so-called economists so that they can fiddle with their supply-demand figures. But we know for a fact that that has only made the lives of countless farmers miserable. I don’t want to elaborate on this any further. Suffice to say that such a reorientation in the farming system framework is a sine qua non in our efforts to change the face of rural Leyte.