Saturday, November 17, 2007 Carvajal: From rural to urban poor By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
EVERY now and then one comes across a piece of good news like the item the other day about Department of Agriculture (DA) 7’s program of establishing food terminals, run by cooperatives, where farmers can market their produce directly and not through middlemen.
Activists and government experts have talked about the need to provide small farmers with the facility to market their products directly so they maximize their profits. Yet how many such terminals have been set up and how many cooperatives have been organized by the government for this purpose?
Another welcome piece of news came when Gov. Gwen Garcia told me the other day that she has asphalted almost every provincial road in my home town of Barili. It seems that she has a program of paving all provincial roads which are mostly farm-to-market roads. She is right on target here.
Our farmers need good, all-weather farm-to-market roads so their perishable products can be marketed before they rot. We have evidently made some progress here but the effort and the resources expended have been quite meager compared to the billions of pesos spent to build first class roads in the big cities.
However, I still have to hear about the DA coming up with a serious and honest-to-goodness program of giving farmers access to cheap capital. Most developed economies subsidize their farmers. We do not. Hence, our small farmer goes for food security by producing corn because this requires the least capital.
In Argao, my neighbors tell me what profitable vegetables to plant. But when I ask them why they are not planting those in their farms, they answer to a man that they do not have capital.
I am also waiting for something substantial to happen in the area of irrigation. I remember reading not too long ago about how a town in Spain was planning to rehabilitate its irrigation system that was built in the 12th century yet. How many farms are irrigated in 21st century Philippines?
In any case, the good news I mentioned earlier are a welcome development because if one is to fight poverty, one must fight it at its source. Poverty in the Philippines, as in many developing countries of the Third World, can be traced to government neglect of small farmers in the countryside. Hopelessness in the rural areas drives many to underdeveloped cities only to end up joining the ranks of the urban poor.
Our small subsistent farmer knows his farming and is eager like the rest of us to improve his life. However, the feudal phase of our history (and we’re not out of it yet) has disadvantaged him so much that he can really use a lot of help from the government. We cannot leave our farmers to eke out a living on their own and expect this country to bring poverty down to acceptable levels.
