I MET Washington Post correspondent William Branigin decades ago when he visited the province. He cited in a Post article “Poverty on Negros Island Breeding Filipino Rebels” the 1986 provincial government statistics that 74 percent are estimated to be suffering from varying degrees of malnutrition.
Branigin wrote that “Widespread poverty, a depression in the world sugar market, years of exploitation of sugar workers by feudalistic plantation owners, the activities of political warlords and a radicalized Roman Catholic Church have made the island of Negros a caldron of revolutionary agitation.”
The natural response on the part of the local government—and civil society—is to address food scarcity with the food security program.
Food security meant that development programs should enable farmers and farm workers to produce enough to tide them over the tiempo muerto until the next harvest season.
We are now in 2018. The province has suffered the Asian and the Wall Street financial crisis. Yet the Negrenses withered these storms.
Recently, Provincial Agriculturist Japhet Masculino has launched the Focused Agriculture Area for Sustainable Transformation covers a 200-hectare rice area of the Newton-Camingawan-Para Farmers Association (NECAPA) in Purok Camingawan Proper, Barangay Taloc in Bago.
It’s no longer a case of traditional rice production where rice is an indicator of food security. Governor Alfredo Marañon Jr. where Bago farmers tried to mechanize the process of transplanting rice seedlings, with the aim to fully mechanize all the rice farming processes during the second cropping.
But someone is not impressed. “With agro-industrialization as the frame, you need to go beyond food security and food self-sufficiency.”
Former Agrarian Reform secretary William Dar said local agrarian economies must “developing the sub-sector of the high-value agriculture, which will give you more income security rather than concentrating on a few crops.”
Dar insists that the world is now in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which the digital age infuses and encompasses the physical and the digital world, and impacts all disciplines, economies and industries.
Meanwhile, University of Asia and Pacific professor and economist Rolando Dy said Philippine agriculture is only modern by 10 percent compared to the over 50 percent average in Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.
He asks, “What is our objective? To reduce poverty or just achieve rice self-sufficiency? How will the latter reduce poverty?”
Yes, indeed, how far can Negrense agricultural mechanization go?
How far can diversification going beyond sugar and rice production?
bqsanc@yahoomail.com