Rich farmers, rich country

Ike Señeres

 IT’S an old story that has to end sooner or later, but I hope that that it will end as possible. After over a century of being a Republic, our farmers are still poor. As a matter of fact, farmers account for the majority of our people that are poor. And yet, no one can say that our farmers are lazy, because several generations of them have been working in their farms, breaking their backs and burning their skins. After many decades of working hard and yet staying poor, it is time to conclude that the success or failure of our farmers has nothing to do with their willingness to work and it has everything to do with the factors around them and above them that are beyond their control. In other words, everything has to do with our willingness to help them, and that includes US, the people and also our government.

Not too long ago, we all knew that we were already helping the farmers by simply buying and eating the crops that they produce. That was during the time when most if not all of the produce in the market were locally grown, and smuggled goods were not yet in the picture, more so the legitimate imports that were able to get in because of globalization. Nowadays however, it is almost impossible to say that we are helping our OWN farmers by simply buying and eating what they produce. The reason for that is the almost absolute absence of proper consumer labelling, notwithstanding the very clear presence of labelling laws. And yet, as I remember it, proper consumer labelling of all imported products was supposed to be one of the safety nets that were supposed to be in place, as a defense mechanism against the effects of globalization.

As I see it, not even our government should be exempted from complying with the consumer labelling laws. It is already a given fact that our government is already importing rice, but I think that even the rice that is imported and distributed by the National Food Authority (NFA) should be labelled, so that consumers would know what they are buying and where the rice that they are buying is coming from. In theory, it is still possible that locally grown rice could be cheaper than imported rice, but that theory seems to be irrelevant right now, because right now we could not even tell which ones are imported and which ones are locally grown, because of the absence of proper labelling. Up to now however, I am still trying to understand how our government is able to determine the volumes of rice that has to be imported, given the fact that importation is only supposed to be a strategy to augment what could not be supplied by local production.

As it is now, it appears that our government is unable to gather and consolidate data about local rice production, which should actually be the basis for rice importation decisions. In the absence of empirical data, it would seem that our government is only guessing and estimating what is available locally, and on that basis, they are already making the decisions as to how much volume to import. It appears that we are now in a “chicken and the egg” situation, with our government saying that we have to import rice in the meantime that there is a shortage in our local rice production, and yet they are not really setting real targets as to when they could actually reach a local production level wherein imports would no longer be necessary. Given the fact that this is all about data gathering and data consolidation, we should start with that, and that is a good start as any.

But first things first, let me backtrack a little bit. In my studies about renewable energy production, I came across the term “municipal governance”, alluding to the fact that local development could, and should be managed in the municipal context. That “discovery” led me to remember what I have been writing about for so long now, that the term “municipal” should be used here in this country to refer to both the towns and the cities. That way, we could use the term “municipal governance” as a generic term that would refer to all local government units (LGUs) that are below the provincial level. That way also, we could standardize the nomenclature of the Municipal Development Councils (MDCs) to refer to both the towns and the cities. This is important to accept in the context of this discussion, because the gathering and consolidation should be done first at the municipal level.

I am making it a point to talk about data management, because it is a business process that is directly related to the marketing of all agricultural production, and not just rice production. Of course it could be said that our farmers have many problems that are actually on top of each other, but if you ask me, I would say that the best place to start is the rationalization of farm gate prices. The farm gate is the point where the oppression of our farmers could easily be detected, recorded and remedied. Of course, data management alone by itself is not the only solution. We all know that many if not most of our farmers could no longer get the best price for their produce, because the middlemen are the ones who dictate the prices, given the fact that the farmers are heavily indebted to the middlemen, in other words, the production of the farmers are already considered “pre-sold” or “pre-negotiated” at very low prices.

It goes without saying that the way to liberate our farmers from the stranglehold of the middlemen is to give them access to affordable capital, the kind of financing that is not oppressive nor is usurious. Sad to say, the anti-usury laws in this country have been abolished, paving the way for loan sharks and usurers to proliferate. There is still hope however, as more microfinance organizations, credit cooperatives and rural banks are getting into the picture. In closing, we could say that financing and marketing are two areas where interventions could be quickly made to help our farmers. Of course, that is just to start helping them, because they also need help with technologies, specifically information and communications technologies (ICT), renewable energy technologies and food processing technologies.

In a recent case study, an ICT provider was able to prove that farmers in a municipality were able to increase their production by simply using text messaging. If you are wondering how that happened, I will tell you that they increased their revenues when they were able to sell at higher prices, after getting the right price information via text messaging. Using their profits that they derived from higher revenues, they were able to invest more in production, hence their harvest also increased. This is the kind of positive chain reaction that should happen among our farmers. Not the negative chain reaction that now results into a chain of oppression that keeps our farmers poor. Going back to proper labeling, if only we will know what to buy, we can make our farmers richer, and as they become rich, we will also become rich as a country.

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