I AM happy that the road to Barangay Tuburan is almost paved in concrete. And for one who listened intently to the campaign speeches of then candidate Oscar Moreno, now incumbent and on his second term as mayor of Cagayan de Oro, he has so far fulfilled or rather fulfilling the three consistent promises he made then: road, schools and hospitals. Of course, the other as important functions, assigned to lesser mortals of even much lesser capacity to handle a city like Cagayan, have disappointed many. But that is not what I intend to talk about.
Tuburan, like other rural barangays, adjacent to Iponan River, saw much of its mountains, hills and arable lands destroyed by hydraulic gold mining. From a highly silted river, it is now slowly being brought back to life.
Residents are now back to producing various crops, children are going back to school and the trading of agricultural produce is providing the sustenance of the residents in these barangays. Finally, the relentless drive to drive away the operators of illegal mining activities, mostly financed by Chinese nationals, have produced results, much to the delight of the residents of the area.
It cannot be denied that it took much courage and strategy by environmental advocates to bring to everyone’s attention, how decades of hydraulic mining and those monstrous river dredging machines wreaked havoc to the environment. I did take part in one daring operation, headed by Edwin Dael. Diverting from the original plan of the national environment agencies, our team, armed with its’ own intelligence informants, swooped on a operational barge and caught two Chinese nationals with expired tourist visa.
Still, the powerful past administration downplayed the incident, saying that these machines were dredging the river. Many continued to believe the lies, despite the mining paraphernalia and equipment used in gold mining and trading seized. We even went to the Court of Appeals, filed and were granted the Writ of Kalikasan to compel the local government and other concerned agencies to stop all activities which has destroyed the fragile ecosystem of Iponan River. And when Edwin Dael was appointed as head of the City Local Environment and Natural Resources Office or CLENRO, the dismantling of the illegal mining operations continued with more vigor.
However, that left a vacuum for the residents who had known no other viable source of income for years. Furthermore, the deplorable state of the roads left much of the little agricultural produce they had to rot. But not anymore.
A friend commented to a previous article I wrote that “infrastructure or the lack of it shapes people” also. The article I wrote was more of values shaping people who will in turn create the infrastructure to enhance, support and sustain their values. But there is no argument there. And so I returned to these rural barangays to do exactly that. Our civil and political leaders have spent billions but abused the so-called “people empowerment”. Not to put the blame solely on our leaders but how the decades old culture of dependency has the growth of our rural folks, reducing them to mendicancy from the scraps of whatever is left, to the ravenous drive to urbanization. Agriculture feeds our people and our economy. And we are tasked to reverse the trend from service driven to production economy.
And paving those roads are not enough. Incentives need ordinances to encourage farmers to plant more. The so-called big picture is for us to have the farmers’ produce make its way, as raw materials for consumption but also for production. There will always be that resistance to new technology. And that goes the same for agriculture. Farmers not just to produce one product, but to be able to harvest different products whole year round, so that our rural folks will have regular income. More importantly, since most of the residents of our rural barangays are Higaonons, our agricultural policies need to be attuned to and respect the culture of one of the largest tribal groups in Northern Mindanao. And so I wonder if our City Agricultural Office has a master plan for the so-called “big picture”. The concreting continues.