Wednesday, April 30, 2008 Covington: The trouble with rice By Gary Covington Looking in
A WHILE ago in an article called "Start with the farmers", Bong Wenceslao was lamenting how tenant farmers, thanks to rapacious landlords, are forever doomed to "wallow in poverty". What Bong didn't get around to discussing is how landowning farmers -- agricultural smallholders -- usually end up in the same boat.
Back in the early 90s I was a rice farmer. The Covington estate was a modest two hectares in Mesaoy, near New Corella in Davao del Norte and the brief experience -- farmer Covington only lasted a year -- was something of an eye-opener.
The European idea of a rice farm -- a Europe where no wetland rice is grown -- verges on the idyllic. Travelogues, news features, even our own tourist information people invariably dwell on footage of smiling happy peasants knee deep in a golden harvest or cheery crowds about a mobile thresher, fat sacks of palay heaped in the background.
Never do the newsreels mention the backbreaking labor or ill-tempered carabaos or the niceties of irrigation; never do they show the farmer's rustic shanty or his teeming snot-nosed family.
Eye-opening too because -- as on those first days I looked out over unworked fields rank with weeds and grasses -- here was a farming system essentially unchanged since before biblical times; a system relying largely on the cooperative efforts of man and beast.
It was to be six months before we took in our first harvest. Plenty of time to learn about snails and the nursery and water gates and how the rice likes so much water now and so much water then and plenty of time to learn that my rice-growing farmer neighbors were up to their necks in debt; metaphorically bound hand and foot forever to traders' cartels and utang.
Farmer-type utang is nothing like borrowing a cellophane of cooking oil from the corner tindahan. Farmer type utang is why all small farmers, whether tenant or landholding, remain dirt poor, and this is how it works.
Farmer's families are usually huge, family planning of the "Oops, here comes another one" variety. There's never any spare cash about, anything to pawn long gone, and so the farmer has to borrow.
The obvious place to ask is the farmer's suki -- the usual buyer of his palay or the trader he buys his farming supplies from -- and this he does, pledging his future crop against the loan.
Snag is -- and I found this out when I sold my palay -- is that in any given area all the palay buyers and supplies traders will be related or connected and it is they who set they buying price of palay and the price of supplies which will be the same, or very nearly so, in every establishment.
The farmer is now in a hole he cannot climb out of. The sale of his crop will realize (maybe) sufficient funds to cover his utang and allow him and his family to subsist for the next three months but -- fancy that -- there'll be none spare to buy the next season's seeds and supplies, he must pledge again.
The farmer has, in effect, become a tenant of his own farm and doomed, as Bong wrote, to forever wallow in poverty.
