A Tale of Two Opposite People

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

BIMBO CABIDOG

Mano Pepe, a tenant-farmer, reckoned that he may have been tilling his rice field since 1963. In 2010, my last conversation with him, he was already 68 years old. Instead of retiring for a dearly needed long rest, with a lump sum and pension to spend like government employees, he must yet go on tilling the soil.

Perennially hounded by economic uncertainty and failure to meet even the minimum requirement for his family to subsist, Mano Pepe has to continue farming via tenancy. He struggles to make ends meet with an income actually not enough just to pay debts. He borrows more from those he does not owe yet.

A young trader in town is the most recent one to lend him five thousand pesos to be repaid with 25 sacks (around 40 kilos per sack) of palay upon harvest. The loan, which is de produkto – payable by proceeds during harvest, fetches an interest that pauperizes. But Mano Pepe had no choice or he would not be able to get the capital for planting.

The trader-loan shark strangulated the old man and yet did not want him to succumb to illness or retire from sheer incapacity to undertake anymore the physically exacting toil in the fields. But how could he remain healthy and physically fit for work when he could not get replenishment for the energies he spent, being hard up and further squeezed by the businessman?

The plow has been rusting beside the hearth for some years, because Mano Pepe no longer plows. The farm work is being done by a hand tractor that farmers hire accompanied by two operators. The change in cultural practice has added capital expense in soil preparation where there was none before. Because of the financial burdens that choked him with debts, the sexagenarian must yet lash himself to toil for many more years until his aging body finally bows to attrition. But besides his farm, he must also work for wage in other fields to sustain his family.

In the last two harvests, he wasn’t able to turn over share to the landowner, for there almost wasn’t a sack of palay left anymore. Loan collectors guarded the grains while still being threshed and thereafter scooped for each one what Mano Pepe owed including high interest. He was not even able to reserve part of the produce for the irrigation fees which have been accumulating for many years and were already hard to settle. When the irrigation collectors tallied the whole amount due, it was nearly equivalent to the market value of the land.  

One day, the landowner called Mano Pepe to his house and told him that he can no longer till the rice field. Receiving not even a single centavo in gratuity or termination fee to tide him over the succeeding months, he was forced to give up tenancy. The sudden turn of event forced him into badly needed retirement, but for Mano Pepe it was worse than death.

The landlord who also subjected him to usury as one to whom he would run for credit in times of dire need has had second thought and hesitated to make the harsh decision of expelling him, for how could Mano Pepe still pay if he no longer has any harvest to bank on, or worse if he dies?

But the aging son of the sweat had other thoughts already to yet make a plea. He felt betrayed. As much as he could, he paid his obligations. He always was not the one to abuse or wrong anybody. What has he done to be meted such a cruel fate? For the first time in 47 years of bondage, in his advanced age, he felt like wanting to rebel.

After a long and hard-fought economic war, the old man faced defeat. It was the worst time of his life. It taught him that strong hand, sturdy physique, untiring muscles, skill and wit were not enough to win. He didn’t even know what exactly happened. Why did he lose?

He did his share of no mean labor, extended generosity to relatives and friends, loved and kept his family, paid his dues, and abided by the rules. Why the unkindest cut? Why the fatal hit from nowhere like the vicious swing of a club by an enemy he didn’t know?

Almost five decades ago, he learned to farm. He was excited to be the next one to wear the cloak of peasantry handed down by his ancestors from generation to generation. He was a breed of the strong, who braced with a wiry frame against the lash of wind and rain and sun to produce the food the people need. He had lost count of the seasons he had been bonded to the fields.

For such faithfulness, he did not expect to be rewarded with hunger and uncertainty. He felt fate has conned him at the gambling table.

About the same time he took full responsibility of the farm, Luding (not the person’s real name) began his business of palay trading with a capital of P3,000, already a fortune then. One strategy by which he hooked customers was lending to farmers. Virtually advancing payment of future produce through loan, he not only bested other businessmen in getting share of sold palay during the harvest season. He chalked higher profits from the interests on loans. Over the years, he reaped windfalls of financial gain.

In less than half the time Mano Pepe has been tilling the soil, Luding was already able to construct a 2,000-cavan capacity warehouse and acquire a rice mill. Wealth began to show in his social status. His residence metamorphosed into one of the most expensive and luxurious house in town. His children went to college in Manila.

As Luding’s means further grew, he pursued a political career. Not long after, he rose to the highest office in the municipality by winning its mayoralty race with a big electoral chest, not only for campaign sorties, but most importantly for vote buying in which he dominated rivals.

Is the future for farming just so starkly different than for agribusiness? Philippine agriculture has blessed big business with super-profits and made cunning business proprietors rich overnight. But over the years, it has benighted farmers with the curse of poverty and perpetual debt. Even as they bend and sweat in backbreaking toil, release from hardship was just so elusive.

Who could have warned them that the sack they were putting their grains on has no bottom? But such was the fate the tillers would repeatedly bump into with the farming system they have been doing over the number of years Mano Pepe has been toiling in his field.

Despite the hard labor and investment of so much time of their lives, peasants like Mano Pepe ended up holding the last sack in the queue of people extracting each one’s gain, and it has nothing more to put in.

In my dogged investigation, I have traced their damned suffering to that pivotal event during Mano Pepe’s initiation to tillage about forty years ago. This was when government technicians and functionaries deceptively and forcefully shifted the old ways and practices of farmers to the production systems introduced by the so-called Green Revolution that require high external inputs and are capital intensive.

The latter uprooted the old heirloom varieties that the farmers genetically conserved. It aggressively replaced them with breeds that scientists and purported experts genetically engineered in laboratories. But because the newly introduced breeds were stranger and not adapted to the agro-ecosystem onsite, they necessitated a whole package of technology to import the conditions that cultured them with vaunted high yields. This entailed a lot of capital to pay for costly seeds, fertilizer, pesticide, machinery, and labor, besides the harder toil and heavy pressure being exerted on farmers.

The GR paradigm made businessmen that suck from the farmers, like Luding, immorally richer and richer. At the opposite pole, it made farmers who would be condemned forever to extreme hardships, like Mano Pepe, outrageously poorer and poorer.

A Life So Firmly Rooted

HUMANITY

BIMBO CABIDOG

In a time that is sure not to come back anymore, I have observed and actually experienced a life so firmly rooted and simple that folks did not think of anything else better.

Before the burst of dawn, as sure as the sun rises, the cocks crowed. They were our alarm clock waking up everybody at the exact time to get ready for the day’s tasks. As the folks rose from bed, they were assured by the fowls’ noise that everything is okay.

But the elders were already up earlier to sip brewed coffee or salabat (ginger tea). They talked about the course ahead: work in the farm and trip to the town proper if needed.

Rice was not milled but pounded on a pestle of massive hard wood. It was cooked in the clay pot then brought to the table sweet smelling and steaming hot right from the fireplace.

Most mornings never failed to accompany the boiled rice with tsokolate (thick chocolate brew) and dried fish grilled in the glowing embers of coconut shell charcoals. The salty fish’s mouthwatering scent wafted from the kitchen to the dining hall and made us hungry.

Breakfast had all the members of the household gathered together in communion to receive God’s grace before each one went to work.

During inclement weather when somber dark clouds hovered over the village, the sun still illuminated the place to prove that it doesn’t stop from shining. Its fingers of pale light crept into every nook and lifted the veil of the night.

All hands continued to busy with work even if the strong winds and pouring rain kept everyone from venturing into the fields. We braced the house with poles, put weights on the thatched roof, and kept items around the house safe if typhoon lashes.

Life was truly okay. Relations among humans and between humans and the rest of the natural biophysical realm were stable. Neighbors shared food and salt. Members of the community knew each other by name and were there when help was needed.

Hunger wasn’t a concept of ill, social or otherwise. It was just what fellowmen experienced when food was not yet ready. Worry over missing a meal generally did not occur.

If a family has to buy rice, you couldn’t believe it, the staple’s price was eighty centavos per ganta (two and a half kilos). But usually, folks mixed it with corn grits, not only to save, but to make the stomach sturdier for toil.

Vegetables were obtained free or bought at a token pittance. They were stewed in coconut milk and spiced with lemon grass, at no expense at all. Later, I found out in my researches that the dish is not only highly nutritious, but also medicinal.

Expectations were almost always met that waiting for result sometimes bored. Seasons happened as predicted, and the farmers could tell by reading signs in the sky if it will rain or not, then they decided whether to proceed or postpone with the drying of produce.

Rice planting was in January called “karayapan” and June to July called “bondok” among Waray-Warays. During the said seasons, continuous rains fed the land, and the farmers were able to plow the fields which softened. Without yet the irrigation systems that crisscross the granaries now, there was enough water to saturate the paddies and nurture the crops.

During the harvest season, the sun would be up for days without fail to let the grains ripen. Along with the sunny weather, the green fields turn to golden brown manifesting that the crop is ready to reap. And they are cut, as dry as the farm workers that shear them.

Folks started the harvest with a fest, where the fields lit up during the night. They gathered around a makeshift fireplace to sizzle on a large kettle unripened grains that are later pounded to a tasty milky fluff called pinipig.

In the town, the non-farming residents on the other hand had little needs and contented with what there is. They did not crave for the things their descendants could not live without at present. There was no electricity yet. Appliances were rare or non-existent in households.

A relative of my mother who was an appliance agent in the city, 32 kilometers away, sold us a transistor radio powered by four A-sized batteries. When the gadget that was as big as a shoeshine box arrived, we were all very excited. It was a piece of treasure.

No finger ever got to flick a switch to an electrical light bulb, much more touch a cellphone keypad. But we led happy lives, and I can still vividly remember, even happier than people now do.

The escribyentes or clerks at the municipal hall were the nearest to the present well-off middle class. They received a salary of only P50 a month. But then again, P10 already went a very long way. My father told that my grandfather would make do with it for three months.

A piece of pan de sal (the Pinoy morning bread) cost one centavo, or one hundred pieces for one peso. The price of a twelve-ounce soft drink was ten centavos. With fifty centavos, I can already fill up on a sumptuous snack of pancit guisado with bread and drinks.

You won’t hear citizens grumble about the price of gasoline. Most of them walked to barrios seven to more than ten kilometers away. Two passenger vehicles plied an interior route. Pasaheros (passengers) wait for hours in the terminal before the auto leave.

The trip to the interior barrio wound up and down a bumpy mountain road studded with protruding boulders and potholes, also for hours. The return trip was on the next day.

Because life – easy or hard, was fully accepted with earnest thanks to the Maker for the blessings that came, tensions and harassing pressures were minimal.

Contentment is not an achievement. It is a choice in the here and now. One reason why we remember the past as the good old days is that the people chose contentment. They were okay with what they got.

They bore life’s burdens and sacrifices without adding to them the sorry weight of resistance and remorse. They gave the devil of daunting hard work also a warm reception. If you have that stuff, how can you regret living?

Now, folks live in a much troubled world.  Those who have all the means to live in comfort and enjoy convenience to the fullest still keep complaining. Despite the technologies to do better, things are worsening. And never have humans been so endangered.

The more people want to control, the more situations become unmanageable and out of hand. Storms and rainfalls are becoming extremely tragic and catastrophic. Communities encounter disasters with devastating effects never hitherto imagined. Man’s only habitat and source of life support, planet Earth, no longer gives without fail.

How Can They Go Hungry?

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS

BIMBO CABIDOG

Is hunger real? It is hard to believe in a country that is extensively rural, where most of the people produce food through farming and fishing. Theoretically, Filipinos cannot go hungry. Ideally, they should not. But sadly, they do go hungry involuntarily.

The number of Filipinos who suffer from hunger is quite big. Social surveys report that 16.9 percent of households in the county or approximately 3.5 million of them miss food on the table many times a year. More than this is what social workers or social service providers who immerse in communities tell.

Hunger is a gut-wrenching reality to one-third of the population in majority of barangays all over the archipelago. Ironically, and this is even harder to believe, farmers who are the country’s prime food producers experience it themselves.

Among rice farmers, the so-called inverted pot (meaning there’s nothing to cook anymore) happens just a couple of months after harvest. Unfortunately, not only are the grains gone with nothing left, they also have no more money in the pocket. Even if food stores are around (which of course are not to be seen in rural areas), they still cannot go there to eat.

What happened? While the palay is still being threshed, a queue of people with empty sacks already formed to catch the grains as it comes out of the huller. Those were the ones the farmer owed money de produkto – that is to be paid with produce including interests. He uses the loans for capital during planting, and the family’s sustenance during off season. In some cases however, borrowed money inadvertently goes to drinking sessions or bets at the cockpit.

The bulk of the harvest ends up in the hands of the bigger loan sharks and traders who buy the farmers’ commodity at predatory prices. Palay is converted to cash and cash is channeled to usurers with little left to buy needs that last only for a few days.

When the reapers, threshers, on-farm laborers, debt collectors and mere kibitzers leave after the threshing and division of the harvest, the fields return to quiet including literally the farmer who becomes silent for a while as he reverts to penury.

The poor guy may be lucky to retain one or two cavans of palay to dry and mill in reserve for the family’s ration over the next three to six weeks. But that is all. Toil has rewarded him with the forfeiture of its fruits. It is his fate every planting cycle, twice a year.

Going through the same reality every harvest season seems senseless. There’s no rhyme or reason in continuing to pursue a losing venture. But they don’t have any choice. At least, they are still connected to the lenders and can survive by borrowing with their crop as guarantee.

Visiting observers tell that in countries like Japan, the farmers are pampered with subsidies to have enough reason not to leave the countryside and seek greener pastures in the industrial urban centers. Rice, for example, is bought by the government at padded prices, that is: twice the cost of production. But in the Philippines, predatory regimes of production and markets set by traders, financers, usurious lenders, and government functionaries batten on the farmers.

It is of common knowledge that during harvest season, traders make the buying price of the farmers’ produce very low. But during the lean months, when they are unfortunately forced to buy milled rice, the price of the product is already exorbitantly high. 

The market is not the farmers’ only woe. Their system of production virtually drives them to the killing of intense exploitation. So-called experts of the government posing as technicians first wrestled them into adopting cultural practices under the label of scientific farming or modern technology. The paradigm consequently trapped them in a production setup that applies genetically engineered varieties, maximum tillage, hired labor, massive infusion of fertilizer, and pesticides. All of them spelled intensive infusion of capital.

The paradigm shift had two deleterious effects. One is the complete abandonment of the ecologically benign and economically viable farming of old that used the farmers’ genetically conserved pest-resistant and environmentally adaptive varieties, did less soil preparation, availed of labor-exchange collectives, recycled soil nutrients, increased the fields’ biological resource base instead of deplete them, and most of all required minimal capital – in short, freed farmers from the stranglehold of finance and markets.

When the farmers abandoned the old indigenous varieties, it changed their mode of production for good. Replacement by the new certified varieties wiped out the old ones. Eventually, the farmers no longer have anything to conserve and replant. They became reliant on the supply of varieties genetically engineered and certified by purported scientific experts, and reproduced by government-accredited seed producers. The new arrangement allied with business profit making.

The development led to the other deleterious effect: it held the farmers captive of the predatory regimes of finance and markets by big business. The new dwarf varieties in contrast to the traditional tall ones necessitated replicating in rice fields the same laboratory conditions that not only produced ideal yields, but grew the crop itself. Among such conditions were thorough pulverization and cleaning of the soil (weeds could not be allowed to sprout for their growth supersedes the dwarf varieties), application of large amounts of inorganic fertilizer, and spraying of pesticides, besides all-round nurturing throughout each cropping cycle.

The practice ushered the mechanization of soil preparation and post-harvest chores, and the maximum hiring of farm-labor power cancelling out the traditional collective labor-exchange. The genetically engineered varieties served as the Trojan horse that laid bare the hitherto business-profit-insulated farms to the strangulation of external finance and markets.

The enactment of the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act of 1997 intended to achieve food security in the country through a progressive agricultural sector. It mandated the allotment of P20 billion per year to improving farm productivity and upping farmer performance.

But the law’s implementation was not taken seriously. Huge funds instead flowed to corruption, such as the fertilizer scam in 2004, which involved Agriculture Undersecretary Jocelyn Bolante in the funneling of at least P700 million pesos to the electoral bids of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her party mates in the guise of giving fertilizers and agricultural kits to farmers.

Hunger, according to a study by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is not due to short supply of food. It happens in times when food produced is abundant. The problem, FAO reported, is caused by the lack of access to food.

The case of the inverted pot of the farmer typifies it. He has more than enough produce not only for his family to eat but to even generate cash through sale of crop surplus. Yet, they still went hungry because he no longer has access to his harvest.

The cause – lack of access to food, shows hunger to be a product and manifestation of an unjust social order. On such note, addressing the problem of masses of people not having food in their table assumes political dimension. This also points out that the ultimate solution to the curse is by nature revolutionary, that is: social restructuring or the overhaul of political-economic relationships. 

Fight Or Flight, Filipinos In The Diaspora

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS

BIMBO CABIDOG

When the late Manuel L. Quezon said “I’d rather have a country run like hell by Filipinos than a country run like heaven by Americans,” he may not have fully imagined the misery his future countrymen would be going through under a rule of their own.

Seven decades after supposedly gaining independence from the United States, most Filipinos would rather get out than remain in their native land. They would rather hack it abroad, dodging bullets and suicide bombers in Jihad-torn places than try to make a living here.

Overseas Filipino workers are from time to time reported to be brutalized by foreign enslavers. They are occasionally subjected to unjust conditions and encounter violence in alien work environments. And there is usually no chance at redress. Nevertheless, they still want to go abroad instead of just seek betterment at home.

In 2003-2005, when air bombardment by the US was pulverizing the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, and the Israeli Defense Forces later was also doing the same to the Lebanese capital of Beirut, tens of thousands of trapped foreign nationals scrambled for the nearest exit from these places. But Filipinos anguished at being prevented to enter and take jobs inside the war zones.

Were they so desperate not to mind the extreme dangers? Were things just inexplicably bad in their place of origin? In interviews by the media, they answered yes to both.

Parents, sons and daughters are separated for long years from their families, and distance makes them languish under the weight of distressful thoughts and emotions. But the cold lonely ordeal of earning in a land of strangers is still preferable than braving a life of failing to meet the bare minimum requirements of existence in their motherland.  

About two million Pinoys reportedly reside in the United States. Forty times more would choose to live there if they only have the chance. Hundreds of their compatriots back home queue at the American embassy everyday to get a US visa no matter how grueling and debasing.

It also doesn’t matter if the USA was once an oppressor and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died in the succeeding Philippine-American war when the new colonizer under the guise of teaching the natives self-rule snatched victory from their revolution. The exodus of Pinoys to the land of the Great White Way does not care to remember anymore the untold sacrifices their fathers have gone through resisting American imperialist aggression and fighting for the right to determine their nation’s course.

Over the last quarter of the past century, the Pinoy global diaspora picked up. It became the premier choice to make a living of families and individuals in the country. They saw it as the only way to improve social status by quantum leaps, and to establish firm economic footing. Going abroad denoted independence with a chic conflicted sense of nationality.

Were they on the right track? Filipinos coming to the point of even dying for a living in war-ravaged climes no longer ask or entertain such question. They would rather commit suicide abroad than go through the torture of hearing loved ones wail and gnash in MLQ’s inferno. Curiously, the government has come to call them patriots or modern heroes. So, to beat misfortune in their country by fighting it in other countries has become a noble thing to do.

A grateful citizenry hailed the Great Malayan Dr. Jose Rizal as a national hero, a distinction rightly deserved for his noble and exemplary deeds that led to the birth of a nation. In the end, he offered the ultimate sacrifice of his life, not for himself or his family, but for his countrymen. His being a hero is hence unquestionable.

Rizal was also a global Pinoy. But besides tripping overseas, is there something in common between his life and purpose and those the government romanticizes now as modern heroes? There seems to be nothing more, deserving of the hero label.

On selfless dedication to country, his was as clear as day. He chose to stay here to meet his death even if he had the option to escape a violent outcome by leaving the country. On the part of his forebears in the present diaspora, the same courage and dedication fly. They beat the opposite path: escape the daunting fate in their country by going away.

Rizal’s stints here and abroad were not about merely giving himself and his family a better life. They were about giving the country a better deal. Although his initial impulses were only for reforms under the Spanish colonial order, his works contributed in no small way to nascent nation building. His modern (actually post-modern) counterparts, seeking but their own betterment through disparate pursuits may have contributed to nation unraveling.

But not only that, there’s a whale of difference in perspective between his and his countrymen’s in the diaspora. For the latter, the better life is to be gotten by leaving the Eden that Rizal poetically described “Pearl of the Orient Seas,” and hustling it out in faraway climes. The greener pastures are not here but in the deserts of the Middle East and Africa. To gain a bit of fortune so that a family can shed the perennial condition of ill-being is to try one’s luck where the soil is barren and flowing not with milk and honey but with slick black poison.

Why did they get to think so? Why the diaspora? This has nothing to do with their country, but with how it is being misrepresented and run like real hell.

At present, roughly 60 million of MLQ’s intended independence beneficiaries rate themselves poor. And assessing themselves so is not making light about it. They suffer beyond statistics. They agonize in specific, concrete and multidimensional ill-being. Adding to that is hopelessness and the constant feel of not having the power to reverse their situation.

Yet, it’s not even because of their not working or being able to work for their own good. It’s because they cannot work without being exploited, squeezed, and bled dry by the ones who rule them – the big business proprietors, the compradors, the financers, the employers, landlords, bureaucrats, political dynasties and pseudo leaders. They live under regimes of not only social and economic inequality, but class inequity.

Low unlivable incomes are a product of that inequity. Widespread unemployment also is. The mental conditioning about their helplessness boosts it. And the pervasive thinking that poverty is a fact of life, a fate they can’t do anything about but bear, is part of the conditioning. It fosters dependency: the penchant to look outside or up for redemption.

Thus, seeking job abroad is single-mindedly peddled by the government as the way out of hell. And the canard is in turn single-mindedly lopped up hook-line-and-sinker by the people. But years of experience have shown that hitching folks on the exodus bandwagon to work for other countries has never licked the problem. Underdevelopment prevails, breeding mass poverty and massive numbers of idle labor force with no industry to absorb.

Socio-economic strangulation is matched by marginalization of thought. The diaspora is shown as a heroic sacrifice for family and country. But it is actually a flight from one’s motherland to hubs of dollar-earning labor for other peoples’ prosperity and social advancement. It kowtows to the delusional thinking that foreign wealth is the answer to the tragedy of stunted growth, instead of the nation’s lush fields, resource-rich mountains, and teeming seas.

The thought is a victim of the diminution of labor and innate capacities of the people, a big lie perpetuated by their exploiters to hide the real importance of the citizenry’s brawn and brain as deciding factors in national development.

Finally, the diaspora mentality looks away from the real solution of uniting and putting all hands into the task of building a progressive society on self-reliant means, first employing intrinsic forces and resources, and harnessing the power of dynamic communities.

By the way, the country’s divine providence as mentioned in the preamble of its constitution is not meager or pittance. It has always been the object of lust by colonial/imperialist invaders.

The challenge of development is not to merely seek self-redemption by each Filipino’s hard stint overseas. The challenge is to unite as a nation and collectively buckle down to the task of producing its myriad needs, with Filipino labor no longer deployed in foreign shores but in its own farms, workshops and factories creating tremendous wealth for everyone.

This is the challenge of developing Filipino enterprise, using and managing the labor power of the people supported by the land’s vast natural resources, instead of subjecting both to wanton exploitation here and abroad by foreign masters.

The shift from banking on the global diaspora for survival, to pursuing its own reconstruction and development to augur a better life for the masses, indeed is the way forward for the country. The correctness of the path is astoundingly obvious. But no one can be blinder than those who refuse to see.