Tuesday, June 03, 2008 Oledan: Basic essentials By Radzini Oledan
INDUSTRIES and services comprise the major share of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which marks a big shift away from agriculture.
This trend seems to be the wave of the future. But this changing nature of the economy does not mean that the country can afford to neglect its primary occupation, which is agriculture.
As the current situation painfully underlined, there is no substitute to keep farm production on the high side to contribute to the country's food security.
Ensuring food security is deeply linked on the productivity of the land, which is slowly diminishing, resulting to low yields.
Cultivable lands are under a process of degradation. Farmers have been intensively cultivating rice crops repeatedly without practicing crop rotation.
But this practice is a deadly one as cultivation of the same crop in the same land -- year after year -- depletes the vital nutrients from the soil without a chance for restoration.
The soil gets a reprieve from loss of its nutrients if mono cropping or the cultivation of the same crop is given up and cultivation is carried out for diverse crops. But this is not happening.
Rice cultivation is carried out with more and more chemical fertilizers. The intense and non-stop use of chemical fertilizers is degrading the land's natural fertility.
It cannot be denied that the large scale and continuous use of chemical fertilizers results to an increase in production. This cannot be a lasting phenomenon and it is only a question of time when productivity will start diminishing from the loss of natural soil fertility and even greater application of artificial fertilizers will cease to lead to greater output.
The threats to fertility or productivity of land may be addressed by implementing policies to replace farming based on chemical agents by using organic manures.
Organic farming has been tried in some places of the country and proved to be very successful in boosting output substantially. Notably such increases in output were even higher than what could be achieved by using chemical fertilizers.
It is now up to the Department of Agriculture (DA) to educate and advocate for organic farming and natural ways of pest control.
Organic farming and natural pest control can boost output both in the short term and the long term, and the output increases would be no less than what they achieved from applying pesticides.
The information should be also disseminated extensively among farmers that organic farming will not only lead to large increases in productivity but also result to sustainability if the natural fertility of the land is intact.
Changes have to start somewhere. (Email comments to roledan@gmail.com.)
