How to help our farmers

Farming and poverty go together in this country. Two-thirds of the poor are in our rural areas working as farmers. We should be able to drastically reduce the number of poor Filipinos if we make farming profitable.

But where do we begin? For decades, our government has been allocating a significant portion of the national budget supposedly to help small farmers. We always end up with scams like that infamous fertilizer scam during the Arroyo presidency.

Indeed, all the talk we hear about inclusive economic growth should be about enabling our farmers to earn a decent living. It isn’t happening. The contribution of the agricultural sector to our GDP had been negative to flat.

No wonder we have the longest running communist insurgency in the world. It is easy for the communist New People’s Army to exist in an environment where a large number of our people feel abused and neglected.

Agribusiness expert Rolando “Rolly” Dy observed that Philippine agriculture almost consistently performed poorly relative to its ASEAN peers. This, Dy pointed out, could be traced to low productivity growth and narrow crop product mix.

Dy believes that “while rice remains important as a food staple, it is paramount to push a wider range of market-driven products and value adding to reduce rural poverty.”

Last week, I spent some time talking to some farmers who are part of a program of Jollibee Foundation to make them farmer entrepreneurs. They are Alex Gomez, vice chairman, Kalasag Farmers Producers Cooperative (Nueva Ecija); Ligaya Miras, farmer cluster leader, Lamac Multi-Purpose Cooperative (Cebu); Arnold Dizon, chairman, Kalasag Farmers Producers Cooperative (Nueva Ecija).

The farmers are happy that over the last few years they have been making a lot more money because Jollibee trained them how to run their farms like a business.

Because the farmers must deliver clean onions to Jollibee, out-of-school youth in their areas earn money cleaning up the harvest. Farmers in the program have been able to pay their debts, send their children to school, and buy home appliances.

I initially thought the Jollibee program was a simple contract farming arrangement. The farmers plant onions and other vegetables, and Jollibee guarantees buying their produce. It was apparently not quite that.

Jollibee’s Farmer Entrepreneurship Program teaches farmers to see their farms as a business. They must carefully decide what to produce, how to sell, and whom to sell.

The Jollibee Foundation merely helps by clustering small farms to achieve economic scale, making them conscious of quality control and teaching them how to record their costs as part of good business practices.

In other words, even before Jollibee buys the first onion harvest, a lot of work had been done. Most important of which is teaching farmers to have new mindsets about farming as a business. That’s not easy.

The Jollibee Foundation has a team of agro-enterprise facilitators to help build the capacity of farmers to become reliable suppliers of vegetables.

The farmers I talked to said that being organized into cooperatives is important. It enables them to avail of government assistance, buy seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides in bulk, and have the scale of production required by Jollibee. Microfinance is also easier to access as a cooperative.

Beyond the initial capacity building assistance given by the Jollibee Foundation, the farmers must also be able to meet all the demands of a competitive market. Even as Jollibee will buy everything they can produce, the farmers must still be able to meet quality specifications and sell at current market prices.

The Jollibee project is not a dole out, nor is it a charity, and the farmers will not have it any other way. Being made part of the Jollibee supply chain is their game changer.

Other than white onions, the Jollibee farmer partners are also now supplying spring onions, salad tomato, calamansi, hot peppers, bell peppers and assorted vegetables.

Still, the project has much room to grow. So far on an annual basis, the farmers in the Jollibee project have been able to satisfy 20 percent of Jollibee’s needs. They say they can do more, if they had more assistance.

Apparently, they only have one crop of onions per year. In the harvest months, they sometimes meet as much as 80 percent of Jollibee’s needs. Then hardly anything the rest of the year.

If they have a green house, one farmer leader told me, they could plant and harvest year-round. Other than the cost of the greenhouse, they need technical help to run it.

The lady farmer growing lettuce and other vegetables in Cebu agreed and added that if they could get help growing veggies by hydroponic means, they could produce more and be better protected from the weather. She is presently selling not just to Jollibee, but also to a large number of hotels in Cebu and Mactan.

They also need refrigerated storage facilities to store produce. This way, they do not have to sell everything after harvest at lower prices.

Their biggest fear today is the army worm. The pest devastated almost all that they planted some years ago. The army worm infestation is worse when we have El Niño.

I brought up their concern to Sec. William Dar and he said DA pest control teams are moving out into the field early to help farmers deal with the problem. He added farmers could apply for crop insurance for free.

I asked them if they still grow rice and they still do. But they said, income from the higher value crops are three or more times than what they can get for rice.

It looks like the farmers are right on target with the new thrust of Agriculture Secretary William Dar, Masaganang Ani, Mataas na Kita (high productivity and prosperous income for all).

Farmers need not be poor. They just have to be taught and helped to be good business entrepreneurs. The Jollibee farmer partners are showing us how.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco.