Kindly bear with me as I use this biblical story as intro for today’s topic on arguments about Philippine agriculture.
The wife of a man from the company of the prophets cried out to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that he revered the Lord. But now his creditor is coming to take my two boys as his slaves.”
2 Elisha replied to her, “How can I help you? Tell me, what do you have in your house?”
“Your servant has nothing there at all,” she said, “except a small jar of olive oil.”
3 Elisha said, “Go around and ask all your neighbors for empty jars. Don’t ask for just a few. 4 Then go inside and shut the door behind you and your sons. Pour oil into all the jars, and as each is filled, put it to one side.”
5 She left him and shut the door behind her and her sons. They brought the jars to her and she kept pouring. 6 When all the jars were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another one.”
But he replied, “There is not a jar left.” Then the oil stopped flowing.
7 She went and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts. You and your sons can live on what is left.”
I share the Bible story from the book 2Kings Chapter 4 as a response to the many naysayers who have been arguing that our state of agriculture is a losing battle, especially because we do not have the economies of scale and the large tracts of land that have been lost to agrarian reform and to those who have claimed that the only solution to it all is “corporate farming.”
If you think about it, what these people are saying is that government does not have the ability to manage our agriculture. That’s true, but their instant noodle solution is let the CEOs and tycoons run the various sectors of agriculture because they have the money and the agility in decision making to get things done. The question is: Do these business savvy individuals and their stockholders want to?
Did it ever occur to those pushing for corporate farming that if corporate farming was really that profitable, all the corporations would have gone into the business a long time ago! Historically, corporations that are into farming are those that started as haciendas or heritage farms that transformed into corporate farms to maximize profitability or protect themselves from land reform or evolved as a result of a specialized product such as banana, pineapple, sugar that was ideal in the area and exportable and the only game in town back then.
Other than that, corporations have limited their investments or exposure to a few choice products mostly in poultry, animal feeds and orchards. Their focus has been on high value or exportable products where the initial product can be processed or used into other products and by-products, thereby extending applications, use and profit margins.
When San Miguel’s head honcho Ramon Ang announced that they were putting up eight super poultry farms, I expressed concerns that the project would compete with local producers. RSA assured me that those plants would be producing chicken to be used as material for “patties” and chicken products for export abroad. When I visited Davao, I met big time fruit orchard developers who were already exporting durian, jackfruit and cacao to other Asian countries.
Many companies that have gone into “farming” are focused on high value vegetables that only upper- and middle-class buyers can afford, or are into trading of rice, but no one has yet gone into honest-to-goodness corporate farming of rice. You must be in too many places at a time.
The other argument is we don’t have farms big enough to mechanize rice production, etc. Land reform never stopped the property developers, land bankers, resort and hotel conglomerates from amassing hundreds of hectares. All they did was help farmers convert their land, bought the properties and now I know of people bragging about their holdings openly.
In an interview with former DA secretary Manny Piñol, I repeated the argument that most farms are one to two hectares, and that irrigation is so limited or almost non-existent. Piñol’s argument is that one to two hectares of land is the ideal size so that farmers can properly manage and care for the land and what is being farmed.
As for the lack of irrigation canals and dams, Piñol repeated a long-known fact: we no longer need to invest billions of pesos on dams and irrigation because solar technology that was developed by Israel, Australia and now China has created stand-alone water pumping stations for irrigation and watering purposes. The government simply needs to redirect the budget for irrigation there.
Solar power technology is no longer limited to providing hot water and lights. There is a ton of materials and products on YouTube alone for those in search of solar pumps for swimming pools, fishponds, farm irrigation and many other applications.
Another person who I’ve often talked to about the state of farming in the Philippines is my friend Toto Barcelona of Harbest, who shared with AGENDA viewers that in Taiwan, many farmers only have one hectare, but the government gives full support by way of providing greenhouses, technology, the best seeds, training and a market system where spaces such as under elevated roads or skyways become weekend markets for farmers, plant growers, etc.
The problem has nothing to do with land area or irrigation. The problem is that those who need to lead are the first to hinder.
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