The city can also be agricultural!

Can Cebu City feed itself? I mean, is there a chance that the farmers within the boundaries of our locality, mostly in the mountain barangays, whose farmlands can hardly be considered as landed estates, can provide the food requirements of all of our close to one million residents?

I am not trying to pull someone's leg, to use a trite cliché. While indeed, the nature of this column is basically off tangent to common discussion topics, I do not engage in indiscriminate firing, so to speak. Rather I choose to explore things outside of the proverbial box in the fondest of hopes that high authorities, be they national figures or city leaders, rising to the heights of their imaginations, delve reasonably deeper into their possibilities.

For a very long while, people have entertained the idea that our city is more of a trading center than an agricultural basket. Right away, this statement seems to answer the two questions above in the negative. This thought is backed up by empirical data and on the ground and it might be foolhardy to ignore them.

Our city is just a small land space of about thirty three thousand hectares. By comparison, Bayawan City in Negros Oriental, chartered just about a decade ago, is more than twice our land mass at some seventy thousand hectares. Add to this limited space is the fact that we do not have the flat terrain that Negrense city has because the greater part of Cebu City is mountainous. And the leveled land that we barely have is mostly devoted to and occupied by residential and commercial buildings.

To continue the comparison, we cannot rely upon our sea for marine products. The fishing grounds that face Bayawan City teem with fishes while the Mactan Channel that serves as our boundary is not known to be any habitat of fishes because it is constantly disturbed by the churning of the engines of merchant vessels that call the port of Cebu.

People come to our city to trade. From available historical tidbits, information came down to us that  when barter was the form of mercantile transaction, producers and consumers from neighboring islands converge here to exchange their goods. In modern age, the explosion of so many malls can only validate the continuation of our status as a trading center.

To be sure, about two thirds of our city's entire area may yield agricultural products that can sustain us. By any calculation, that is still a huge land mass. What makes me optimistic is that as far as I can observe it, only a small part of this mass is cultivated. Hectares upon hectares of land can be tapped for all kinds of agricultural endeavors.

1. The city leadership can score huge if it makes many idle lots productive. Today, despite the unprecedented efforts of the present administration to concrete our road networks in the mountains, there are massive patches of arable lands that remain inaccessible. Naturally, no land owner will ever be encouraged to develop his property if going there and coming back take most of his energy. If the mayor and the city council, in one gesture of cooperation put funds into road building projects in the mountains, we shall see a good start of bright things to come.

2. Many of our farmers are owners of small sized land holdings. They work on their lands more with antiquated tools than with modern machines because the latter is expensive. If the city can hatch a program of putting agricultural equipment into a pool from which farmers may avail either on affordable rental or use, free of cost, then the farmers' production can speed up.

3. Some farmers in the mountains would rather work for others on low pay than attend to their own land. The reason is easy to understand. They do not have enough funds to meet their daily needs. The yield from cultivating their assets comes only months from planting. In the meantime, they starve. So, to get enough cash for their meals, they prefer being paid daily wages. A part of the city's program must address this concern.

I believe that we have enough land space for agriculture. When government adopts plans to make these spaces productive, Cebu City can feed its own people.

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