Two weeks ago, we witnessed the tragedy of a Cavite family – two of the children died from eating the garbage that their jobless father gave them. For the first time in our history, the government will distribute food stamps to the needy. And confirming this hunger that stalks the land is the latest Social Weather Station survey.
But hunger is not new to so many of our poor. When I was a child in that small Pangasinan town, the hungriest months were June to September before the first rice harvest came. The poorest of the poor ate only twice a day, the first meal at 10 a.m. and the second at 4 p.m. Usually, they were landless agricultural workers or tenant farmers who demonstrated in front of our municipio, shouting, mabisin kami! (We are hungry!).
Why does hunger afflict our people?
Are there now too many mouths to feed?
In the ’50s, an international organization’s demographic study of the Philippines showed the country – with much more arable land than Japan – can feed a population of 80 million.
Item: When China’s population was half a billion in the ’40s, famine was a constant threat in that vast country. With the revolution and a more equitable distribution of wealth, and a population of over a billion, famine is no longer a threat to the Chinese, although hunger is still present in some areas.
Item: When Rafael Salas was executive secretary in the ’70s, he mounted a successful campaign of self-sufficiency in rice. During his term, we were able to export rice.
What can be done now?
In the Ilokos every available plot of land is planted. There is no hunger there.
Go to the provinces, to the Visayas. So many lands are idle. Go up the highway all the way to Pangasinan, past the vast Central Plain – so many lands are fallow, because their owners do not care.
Go to Japan, to Taiwan. In Japan only 20 percent of its land is arable – yet Japan produces surplus rice. In the cities, the lands that are not built on are planted to vegetables. A law in Japan taxes heavily all idle lands.
We need the same law here.
Taiwan practices intensive farming. Between the rows of rice plants are equal rows of beans or vegetables. They call it intercropping.
Land reform is still necessary although it no longer means distributing land to the tiller – there is no more land to distribute. But land must be utilized to the fullest. Right in the city, food production can be improved. The empty lots can be planted. As that veteran of World War II and peasant leader Luis Taruc has emphasized, we must plant camote. Fr. Bobby Reyes "the running priest" is not being funny when he goes around with a push cart urging the same effort.
In the Ilokos, all the houses are surrounded by fruit trees, with marunggay. Flower pots bear not ornamental plants, but tomatoes, onions.
All those idle lands in UP Diliman must be planted by the students not just to make those lands productive but to instill in the minds of the young the meaning of the word Motherland, and to have them know how it is to touch the earth.
Filipinos need not go hungry. But in many instances, it is not really their fault, particularly the landless agricultural workers who have flocked to Manila for the brighter opportunities here.
If there is hunger in the country today and finger pointing must be done, we know who the vilest criminals are. The rich Chinese who sent their money to China and Hong Kong, the Spanish mestizos who sent their money to Europe, and Indios like Marcos who salted their loot in Switzerland – all that money should have gone into the development of industry so that our women don’t have to go abroad as domestics and prostitutes.
Sometime back, the late Fr. Hector Mauri, who devoted a lifetime working with the seasonal workers in Negros, was invited with me to a steak dinner at one of our plush hotels. After that dinner, he confided that in the morning, he would go to confession. He had sinned, he said. He had looked at the menu and found out that his dinner cost the same wage a worker in Negros made in a month.
Manila now has so many fancy restaurants; when those profligate diners polish off a gourmet meal and down a P10,000 bottle of wine, do they ever feel that pang of guilt that compelled Father Mauri to go to confession?
If necessity is the mother of invention, what does hunger do to a man? The weak are driven to suicide by it. The strong persevere. An old friend who joined the rebel movement during the Marcos regime said, "Now I know what it means to be hungry, and not have a single centavo in my pocket."
She did not surrender. Nor did she join the hordes who pandered to Marcos and became rich.
Hunger strengthens those who are truly strong, not in the flesh but in the spirit. Hunger toughens the soul without having to erode it. And the world knows less hunger precisely because of those who knew it and have worked to put food before those who starve.
The late NVM Gonzalez wrote a story which points the way for all of us who despair. The farmers in a village called Barok are suffering the curse of peasant life – hunger. They go to town to the landlord to borrow grain which they get. They then hasten back to their farms. Although they are hungry – they do not eat the grain. They can yet subsist on weeds. They plant the rice instead.
To protest against injustice, some resort to the hunger strike to draw public attention to their cause. Ninoy Aquino did it during the Marcos regime which killed him anyway. Ninoy Aquino raised a fundamental question which is perhaps relevant to the problem of poverty today. Is the Filipino really worth dying for?
Hunger dehumanizes people, particularly in a country where there is so much wealth although that wealth is in the hands of a few. To steal rice, says an old Asian proverb, is not a crime; to steal gold is.
In many parts of Latin America, hungry peasants did not wait for their governments to promote agrarian reform. They entered by force the latifundias (large landholdings). Should this be a solution to our growing number of hungry Filipinos?
Here is a memorable quote from the Spanish Civil War: En mi hambre, mando yo. In my hunger, I command.
If only our very poor had the courage and the will to believe in this.
Or yet again, listen now to Emiliano Zapata the Mexican revolutionary tell his hungry countrymen: "Men of the North, it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees."
Maybe it’s time for starving Filipinos to fight – and die – on their feet.