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.