Pro-Rich! The poor we have always with us

MANILA - Today, I'm pro-rich farmers. Time for us to change; why, even the climate is changing! As for me, I stopped being pro-poor farmers a few minutes ago. I'm tired of poor farmers. I'm tired being pro-poor. Pro-poor is hard work.

At 69, with a big family of 12 and for the last 50 years stagnating at upper poor, you can't blame me. I myself am tired being upper poor. Being upper poor, you feel obligated to teach the poor to work harder.

Years ago, I heard Frank Sinatra say, 'I've been rich, I've been poor; believe me, brother, rich is better!'

In the village of Sanchez in Asingan, Pangasinan, my father Lakay Disiong was an upper poor farmer. His two sons who were both BS Agriculture graduates advised him to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and he grudgingly relented. One son (that would be me) graduated from the University of the Philippines' College of Agriculture (UPCA); the older son (Emilio) graduated from Araneta University. Araneta, of course, is nothing compared to UP - according to those who graduated from UP. Well, the UP son and the Araneta son both didn't finish when they should; I needed 5-1/2 years to finish a 4-year course; my brother didn't do any better. I got Extremed in-between; I mean, I was kicked out of UP! So was my brother. Does that explain why we were such poor advisors of farming to our own father? (I discovered my love for writing in history while I was still in high school; a degree in Agriculture was not in my dreams.)

I was a farmer's son but what I did mostly was spray the insecticides and the weedicides. My father did not make me plow the field, and I wasn't interested in doing it myself. I was more interested in reading books. The nearest thing to heavy work I did was harrowing: A carabao pulled a wooden harrow and I rode on the animal.

I remember my particular delight when I was spraying the weed killer 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) - I would spray-soak the weeds until the liquid ran down the plant parts, and watch the leaves die - they would wilt before my very eyes. With 2,4-D, I had dramatic power over the weeds. The pleasure was entirely mine.

I remember those years when I was in high school. I would pasture a carabao or two (yes, we often had two of those) in the open fields about half a kilometer from our house; I would let them loose, and then go looking for frogs. My father knew how to cook a delicious dish out of them; ah, that frog's soup! I would bring out my boy-made pana (spear), which I fashioned out of a thick cloth line, about 1 meter long, with a flattened head shaped into a hook. Yes, I was that mechanical enough. My father would not buy me toys. I was a loner, so I had to entertain myself or make my own toys and tools.

My frog's spear was deadly. Once a hole was in sight, my spear would go poking into its innermost recesses. If I heard a crunch, that meant there was a frog living in a hole; now my spear had gone through its body, and it was dying. That would be repeated with so many holes. Thrust, crunch, sure death. Death? Sure. But all I could think of was the delicious meal that would follow so many sure deaths. Even then, I understood that life was a cycle of death and renewal. The frogs' deaths were my renewal.

My father also had a bubon (fish well), a hole in the ground that would fill with irrigation water; when he drained the ricefield, all the water went out of the paddies and all the fishes into that well, still full of water, where they would be as easy to catch as taking candy from a baby. The fishes were my father's game; the frogs were mine. Nature grew the fishes and the frogs that would make delicious, healthy meals. Mother Nature knew best.

As a young boy with a very active imagination, I was interested in girls but not in figures, so I remember my crushes but don't remember how much money my father made from his planting rice. I remember we had one of the biggest granaries in the village in our backyard a distance away from the back of our house. Lakay Disiong was much more industrious a farmer than the others I saw, and he had two sons as backup for his modern agriculture, but why didn't he become filthy rich or, at least, rich? Not that I would have loved being a rich man's son myself.

I'm reminiscing the 1950s, my teenage years. As I see it now, Lakay Disiong didn't become the rich man he would have wanted because he was not a good businessman. For instance, he had money enough for my cousin to go to Mindoro and buy quite a few head of buffalo and ship and truck back home to Asingan and sell in Urdaneta, then and now the cattle market of Pangasinan. (That is the reason why I almost always had two head to pasture - one was for sale, after a little fattening from being pastured on good and free grass in the ricefields or on the riverbank of the Agno River, which was about 1 kilometer from our village.) My father didn't know about keeping enough records and keeping too much faith. My cousin, bless his soul in Heaven, gave him not accounting but his accounts of what happened to the animals and the money. I didn't know this at that time; what I didn't know didn't hurt me. But it was hurting my father, and I didn't know that either.

So, 50 years or so later, I'm not surprised that the Philippines is still agricultural and not yet industrial. With land flowing with milk (many rivers and streams) and honey (countless delicious tropical fruits), we Filipinos are still poor. (Ted Mendoza adds abundance of sunshine.) At our best, we Filipinos are very intelligent, very industrious, very creative, very persistent, and very meticulous - but we are also still very poor. While we are also very good at carping (or crabbing), I don't think that explains why the Filipinos as a people have not become as rich as the Japanese, or the Singaporeans, or even the Malaysians. Aside from the remonstrance of the Roman Catholic Church ('Seek first the kingdom of God, and everything will be added unto you'), I think it's just that we Filipinos have not learned the arts and sciences of credit and marketing.

For credit, we still prefer the moneylenders, the five-sixers, those who demand six for a loan of five, the interest you pay every single day as long as you have not paid back the principal.

And we are poor entrepreneurs too. The Spaniards stayed 350 years in these islands and didn't teach us entrepreneurship. We only think small, too small. The Americans stayed 50 years and didn't teach us better either.

Marketing, of course, is not only selling; it is also buying. And buying, of course, is not only purchasing - it's making sure you're getting good produce or product. And you cannot get good produce if the farmers don't know good agricultural practices.

Perhaps good farmers make bad marketers, that is why the poor Filipino farmers can't ever be rich.

And chemical agriculture makes bad farmers. The chemicals surely killed all the other frogs I could have hunted with my cloth-line spear; the chemicals were deadlier than the male species that I was. The chemicals also killed the fishes of my father. Before all that, the farmers were poor but they had rich food.

Today, you want rich foods; you want a rich economy - then by all means, you have to be pro-rich; you have to grow rich farmers!

That's why we were there in Moncada, Tarlac Province, on 17-18 October 2009, the staff of the PEACE Foundation, and Professor of Crop Science Teodoro 'Ted' Mendoza of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, and I. We were beginning to implement a project by the short name of BIG-ANI (big harvest), Ted being the proponent and now Consultant to the project, and I the historian. It was Ted who taught the farmers how to make their own organic fertilizer.

Let me not forget to mention that the Department of Agriculture under Secretary Arthur Yap is the one funding the Big-Ani Project. Thanks, DA!

The staffs of Big-Ani were there:
Dennis Abuton, Project Manager
Roly Peña, Agriculturist
Che-Che Mogueis, Community Organizer
Dina Alvarez, Finance Officer
Maria Cristina Bejeno, Bookkeeper
Arceli Eugenio, Farm Technician-Moncada
Cristina Gatche, Farm Technician-Gerona
Ofelia Bancifra, Farm Technician-Tarlac City.

There were 38 farmers who attended the 2-day training-workshop; my shot shows one of the farmers sprinkling a microbe-enriched pitcher of water on the pile of matter; the liquid activator will in 3 weeks turn that pile into compost, rich organic fertilizer. This fertilizer will grow a rich crop; this is the cycle of life and death, and life from death.

The village of Tolega Norte in the town of Moncada was the venue. The DA Regional Office of Region 3 was the first to agree to support Big-Ani; these farmers were going to be trained to establish their own organic, integrated farms and be a model for others.

The farmers came from these Tarlac places: Moncada, Gerona, Paniqui and Tarlac City.

Moncada farmers:
Banaoang East: Adar G Duque and Francisco A Vigilia. Banaoang West: Porferio T Granil and Judy C Facun. Santa Lucia East: Roland B Acosta and Ritchie B Acosta. Santa Lucia West: Rhoda L Arlantico, Jennifer S Esposo, and Arnel Q Arlantico. Tolega Norte: Vicente B Lacbayan, Rowel D Eugenio, Roy Bragado, Mercedes B Cuchapin, and Josefina L Marcos.

Gerona farmers:
(Old) Carbonel: Francisco G Joaquin, Wilson D Dela Cruz, Rosemarie F Dela Cruz, and Emelita T Punzalan. Bularit: Homer C Bucad, Gerry A Villamayor, Noly M Corpuz, and Mercy J Corpuz. Mabini: Jennifer M Aquino and Lisa S Gamboa.

Paniqui farmers:
San Isidro: Ofelia I Bancifra, Efren B Gabriel, and Ricardo E David. Apulid: Perlita N Gabriel. Poblacion Norte: Diego Delos Santos. Salumague: Rufino M De Vera.

Tarlac City farmers:
Mabilog: Noel A Mallari, Edwin Cabilangan, Neftaly Mallari, Dominador Galano, Noly A Mallari, Ernesto Ambrocio, Jesus Maristela, and Erick Naguiat.

(For a report of what happened during the training workshop, click the link to read my 'Moncada Initiative. BIG-ANI as climate change farming.')

All these 38 farmers were in the same boat that my father Lakay Disiong was in 50 years ago: high yield, low income. And why is that? Because of chemical agriculture, farming has been having high total cost and low net returns.

What we brought to Tolega Norte Ted Mendoza calls biodiverse agriculture; he also refers to it as biofarming; I call it climate-change agriculture. No quarrel. As far as I can tell, the concept 'biodiverse' refers to the rich variety of crops and livestock recommended to be grown; 'biofarming' focuses on the use of biological materials such as microbes (fungi and such) to hasten the decomposition of organic matter into organic fertilizer; and 'climate-change' emphasizes the avoidance of chemical agriculture and underscores organic farming as a clean option to chemical agriculture and to help mitigate global warming. In fact, Big-Ani is all that, and more.

Big-Ani was going to teach these farmers organic farming plus cooperativism plus marketing. Goodbye to chemical agriculture; goodbye to helplessness; goodbye to high cost of farming; goodbye to usurious moneylenders; goodbye to non-value-adding of produce; goodbye to unprofitable marketing; goodbye to unfair distribution of the benefits of agriculture. That's the big idea.

We know it's a tall order, but that's exactly why we wanted to do it: we wanted to do the impossible. If doing something good is good, what about doing something better that challenges your very best?

In the Philippines, chemical agriculture as a panacea for rice farming was institutionalized during the unforgettable Martial Law years of President Ferdinand E Marcos. He had 'Masagana 99' (Bountiful 99), a rice production project with a name that signified high yield, Great idea! 99 cavans (4.9 tons) to a hectare compared to the 20 cavans average at that time. Now-Representative Salvador 'Sonny' Escudero was Marcos' Secretary of Agriculture. Of that success, Escudero said (Amy R Remo, 26 April 2008, inquirer.net):

The secret with Masagana 99 was the very liberal credit and extension work. We provided farmers with full credit support. We were in full control of our agricultural technicians, whom we regularly educated.

I'm glad the secret wasn't the genius of Marcos! If they were liberal with credit, so should we. We have to give liberal credit to whom liberal credit is due.

Masagana 99 was chemical agriculture. Can we learn from the enemy? Actually, Masagana 99 had only 1 open-secret element, and this was access: access to technology, access to credit, access to price support for rice, access to low-cost fertilizer. The modern technology for the growing of rice came from Los Baños (IRRI and UP Los Baños); credit, price support and low-cost fertilizer came from the government. This was government for the people, for the farmers. Marcos knew what he was doing, and he was good at it, even in agriculture. He had very good advisers, the likes of Dean Dioscoro L Umali and Emil Q Javier of UPCA. He knew who knew more than he did. He was a brilliant manager; he was a genius.

Masagana 99 was then, Climate Change is now. We must stop using chemicals whose manufacture gives off greenhouse gases that make climate change worse. We need climate-change agriculture now! The intelligent response is not another Masagana 99 but something like Big-Ani, avoiding the chemicals and making use of friendly organic materials all available locally, the spirit of cooperation among Filipinos, and the camaraderie among farming families in the villages.

We are thinking of training farmers to become the successful ecological agriculturists that we have not been, in their God's little acres applying organic fertilizers, planting multiple crops, growing trees, raising fish, caring for poultry and livestock, harvesting and storing their produce properly, adding value to them at the appropriate hour - enriching themselves as they do the soil, the surroundings, their villages, their country.

So, I repeat: I'm pro-rich, not pro-poor. I want the poor farmers to be rich! Healthy rich. Getting what they deserve for their labors, multiplying their wealth without prejudice to anyone. Eating organic food, if it be meat; not breathing in mists of insecticides and weedicides; not poisoning the waters in the fields so that fish can go forth and multiply like they used to in my youth. Among other little dreams, I want even my shy grandsons to be able to hunt frogs in the field with their own ingenuity; and I want my granddaughters to taste pesticide-free fish caught fresh in clear water among the growing rice seedlings in verdant fields.

Is that too much to ask?