Grow vegetables

Ben  Contreras

DO rice and vegetables grow in your backyard? Perhaps, vegetables, because some people just love to grow them in their own backyard, fresh and organic. So, where do the rest come from? The answer: from the farmers. What about the farmers, our farmers?

I forgot how our (I and Ralph Abragan) conversation went to the issue on farmers but we do agree that our farmers should be treated like heroes because they feed the nation.

Was it about the recent incident in Kidapawan where hungry people, farmers, were rallying and asking food from our government? The long spell of El Niño is taking a heavy toll on their farms that they hardly can produce anything.

They themselves are getting hungry and were only asking for assistance from the government. And what did they get. “Bala, hindi bigas.”

As a kid, I remember old folks talking of so and so harvesting rice and there would be celebration of plenty. After a few generations, farmers became a diminishing breed. Every farmer’s dream is for their children to finish school and work in the city as parents break bones in the fields.

The farm promises food while going to the cities in search of those dreams is laden with uncertainties. To be a failure in big cities can be catastrophic. Many ended up liabilities of the society.

Here, many look down on farmers. Most have become poor for lack of support from the government. In the United States, farmers are given their due support so as to make a bumper harvest to feed the nation. What has our government been doing for them?

Farm produce are not like groceries we just pick from the counter. They first till the land, sow the seeds, water them, take care of them and wait for a certain period of time. When it’s harvest time, they need transport to bring their produce to the market. But their problems remain decades after decades: Farm to market road!

Other Asian countries support their farmers of their needs. Perhaps, our greatest mistake would be that we choose to be an industrial nation when we should be focused on agriculture, our country being a composition of more than 7,000 islands.

While it may be true that there have been many government projects aimed to boost food production, most of the funds just went to the wrong pockets because of corruption. After so much fanfare of these projects, they all died a natural death and never mentioned again.

Ralph has a way of saying it: We import cheap rice and kill our own farmers.

Fifty years or so ago, we produced rice in abundance. Neighboring Asian countries sent their agriculturists to learn from us. What happened since? They became bigger producers of rice and we imported from them cheap.

Billions are going to the wrong pockets when it could go to worthy projects. Encourage our young to farm, support them with their needs, implement farm-to-market road projects seriously. Our idle lands could more than feed the nation if given the right support.

Bring them back to the fields and we solve some of our informal settlers’ problem, our traffic congestions, criminality caused by hunger and poverty, etc. Let us grow vegetables in our backyard instead of mere gardens for flowers.
Not doable? Well, we got to start somewhere if we are sincere.