Monday, April 14, 2008 Nalzaro: The farmers’ plight By Bobby Nalzaro Saksi
OLINGAN, Dipolog City—I am still here in my hometown in Dipolog City, the capital of Zamboanga del Norte, for a short vacation. I am writing this column in a nipa hut in the middle of our rice field using my Nokia E90 Communicator. The signal of our cellular providers, especially Smart and Globe, are strong in our barangay, which is seven kilometers from the city.
We don’t need to climb a coconut tree to get a signal. Thanks to advanced communication technology.
During my childhood days, I could not even picture what a telephone looked like since our barangay was not yet covered by the local telephone company.
Now, there are households that have landlines and computers. Even farmers and fishermen own cellular phones.
Life has indeed changed a little in this barangay. But farming is still the number means of livelihood. Farmers are currently harvesting palay and it seems some of them are not having a good harvest. During the planting period last January, some of the agricultural lands were flooded. In fact, there were farmers who ended up planting twice.
I talked to some of my kababayans who are into farming and they shared to me their sentiments regarding their plight. Mind you, most of them have been farming since I left the place almost 30 years ago. They were my late father’s contemporaries. Despite their meager income at least some of them were able to send their children to school, who later became professionals.
As what I have said in my previous columns, I can talk with authority on the plight of our farmers because farming was our family’s means of living. And I am still into it, though, I just help finance the cultivation of our rice field.
We were fortunate compared to other farmers because my father inherited part of the agricultural land he tilled from his parents. We did not need to divide our income. Other farmers are only tenants. They were renting the land through cavans of palay, depending on the land area. After harvest, we sold the big bulk of our palay to rice traders and we only kept a few cavans for the family’s consumption until the next harvest.
The income was used to finance the next planting season. We only earned a few thousands pesos per season considering the high cost of fertilizer and pesticides. And this has been the cycle of farming—from planting up to harvest period. Good if you have a good harvest, But if your plants are being damaged by insects or hit by natural calamities, you lose your capital.
I discussed the rice shortage problem with some of the farmers here and they don’t believe it because in other areas there’s good harvest. Zamboanga del Norte is one of the rice producing provinces in the country. Modesty aside, even the poor people here prefer to eat rice than corn because rice is abundant. Corn is used to feed animals.
Palay is sold at a very cheap price. Traders buy it from farmers at P12 per kilo, especially now that it’s harvest season.
Maybe the price will increase in June or July when the supply becomes scarce. But only a few farmers can stock their products because they don’t have storage facilities. Their harvest will end up getting damaged if they can’t get rid of it. And that means they won’t have the capital for the next planting season.
They heard about the Fields program launched by President Arroyo recently.
She announced that P40 billion will be made available to the agricultural sector. They asked me how they can avail themselves of the program. Well, I told them that it is still a promise and might not materialize or might not be fully implemented. If it does materialize, the big question is, will the money reach the farmers who are in dire need of the funding? I am afraid that what happened to the fertilizer scam might also happen to this program.
