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.