In the recently held national vegetable congress, speakers from the DA national office urged small farmers to raise production and upgrade themselves to become globally competitive. This irregardless of the current conditions of Filipino vegetable producers. It is easy to see why our bureaucrats tend to float in cloud nine. They cannot see field conditions nor can they understand the economic deprivation of small farmers in the upland areas. It is thus “normal” for them to make pronouncements detached from current realities.
Indeed, our bureaucrats as well as technicians wholeheartedly agree on the same idea that there is no other way for the farmer to rise above their present impoverished conditions but to produce and produce for the market. In their doctrine of poverty alleviation, the only way out is to produce high quality and a good quantity of vegetables.
These pictures are clear proofs that natural farming, even under zero tillage conditions, will result in healthy plants. In sloping farms, zero tillage helps to conserve the soil and prevent erosion.
Yet experience has taught a different, contradictory lesson: producing for the market can only spell disaster for the small farmer. Way back in 2002 when tomato production seemed to be the craze in places like Kabentan, Danao and Liberty, a lot of farmers fared disastrously when the price of tomato fell to P2.50 a kilo. The road from Sityo Cambantug to Danao was littered with tomatoes. The transportation cost was higher than the price of the commodity itself, that selling them could only mean more losses.
Besides the actual losses, many farmers could not pay their debts. See, when you produce for the market, you need capital to hire other farmers to help till the soil and plant tomatoes, buy fertilizers and pesticides, and employ neighbors in the harvesting. Such capital is usually borrowed from local money lenders whose interest rates are not exactly generous. This also happened with other crops like eggplant, Chinese cabbage, spring onions and pechay, to name a few.
The economics of vegetable production in these parts is simply a very imperfect science. No one knows how much tomatoes, eggplants or onions the market can consume. It’s a hit-and-miss thing actually. When it’s season for vegetables – these are the sunny months – there’s plenty of the commodity and prices naturally dive. During so-called ‘off-season’, prices move up. This is when some farmers try to make a killing. Until disaster strikes. True, a few farmers who dare to raise vegetables during the off-season months sometimes make a killing, but this is an exception rather than the rule. The risks are enormous and, unless one has enough capital, it is not worth a try. To play it safe, the majority of the farmers prefer to remain idle during these months.
There are no adequate marketing structures and accurate information about the market, so that producing for it can only lead to disaster for the small farmers. They cannot plan under this situation. There is no way of knowing if the tomatoes or eggplants they produce can be absorbed by the market and at what price these will be sold. When production succeeds, the farmer suffers at the market when there is an oversupply of the commodity. When he plants during off-season months, he faces natural calamities that could destroy his crops. Either way, the small farmer is at the losing end. For this reason, such a system of production has never succeeded in uplifting the farmers from the scourge of poverty, let alone enabled them to survive. And yet government continues to preach the same disastrous line, offering all kinds of inducements and incentives.
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I think farmers should instead be taught survival economics at this point rather than try to make them globally competitive. In the years prior to the so-called “green revolution” of the Marcos era, small farmers practiced the samaka system of farming which had them producing all kinds of crops, from rice to vegetables and fruit trees. This way, they experienced no shortages of food in their own tables. In contrast, today’s technologies provide no way out of disaster because it’s a mono-cropping system that’s being practiced. When their crop fails, everything else crumbles because all their stakes have been put into that single crop that is supposed to provide them a way out of poverty. There is nothing more to harvest, no food on the table and debts are piling. For the next few months, the farmer and his family live on a hand-to-mouth existence. “Isang kahig, isang tuka,” as they say in Pilipino.
Moreover, their indiscriminate and mindless use of chemical fertilizers has depleted the soil and turned it acidic, with its natural components gone. The continuous use of these chemicals makes their land a prime candidate for desertification, a phenomenon that has turned many farms into unproductive, barren cogon land.
With the pesticides killing all the pests and insects in the field, their farms are now open to all kinds of predators and pests. The use of such chemicals has caused a critical imbalance in the ecosystem. In order to produce in this kind of situation, the farmer is left with no option but to use more potent pesticides to control the ever growing number of pests that invade their crops the moment these are planted. It would take several years before the ecosystem imbalance is corrected, assuming the farmer realizes his folly.
In the meantime, fertilizer and pesticide distributors rake enormous profits – at the poor farmer’s expense, of course. Ironically, it is government, with its globalization agenda, that fuels this insensitive market-oriented program.
#antipesticides
#antichemicalfertilizers
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