Mayor Garcia can make our city food sufficient

Two communist countries isolated themselves fora considerably long period of time. The then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, principally Russia, before its break up in 1991, called itself as the Iron Curtain while the People’s Republic of China, theBamboo Curtain. They used the term curtain as their way of describing themselves to be beyond the prying eyes of the rest of the world.The Bolshevik troika of Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky, before their eventual enmity, guaranteed that the result of their combined efforts would be their achievement of world power status. Mao Tse T?ng, in an observably similar work ethic,also led his people away from the traditions of Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek.

What did the USSR and Communist China do in their supposed isolation? They plowed their fields, treated infertile lands and revvedtheir industries as they worked on two concerns needed for their survival - agriculture and industrialization. The thing foremost in their minds though while in isolation was to cultivate their farms and stock up their barns because they only had themselvesto provide their needs. In their minds, the engines of industrialization would grind to a halt if their people had nothing to eat.

True to the off tangent nature of this column, I dare to say that Cebu City, can replicate, on a miniature scale, what those giants did.Even if we put the city in an imaginary curtain, we can feed our people. We can and must be self-reliant to produce our own food.

This is where the battle cry “resulta ang garantiya” of the administration of newly installed Cebu City Mayor Raymond Alvin Neri Garcia is relevant. The language of Stalin and Mao might be different but the tenor of Mayor Garcia’s thrust of reversing the policies of the “dismissed” Mayor Rama indicates a non-Bolshevik kind of a necessary Bolshevik-like transformation.

How can Mayor Garcia feed us, Cebuanos? His non-adherence to the Singapore-like Rama program is significant. The total land area of Singapore is approximately 734.3 square kilometers or just slightly bigger than twice the size our city at 315 square kilometers while its population of 5.5 million is five times bigger than Cebu City’s a million. Because of its tiny area, Singapore is best suited for commercial and industrial endeavors. Only about one percent of Singapore land mass is used for agricultural purposes.

In contrast there are large areas of untilled lands in themountain barangays of our city. A new policy direction of giving emphasis to agricultural production will make our city better than Singapore in terms of food sufficiency.

I am not educated in agriculture. But I observe the seemingly insurmountable problem of small farmers. In Barangay Paril for instance, I have a neighbor who owns a hectare of arable land. To plow his property, he needs to hire a plower who, by the way owns a carabao, at the current rate of P600-P800 a day. The plower does the work in an average period of 5-7 days or probably P5,000 for three duration. Include in the computation the replowing, cost of seeds, fertilizer and daily sustenance. My neighbor cannot afford it. Hundreds of hectares in the mountain barangays remain uncultivated because the owners are of the same situation as my neighbor.

I hope Mayor Garcia, who is known to listen to the problems of his unwealthy constituents, can craft a policy of addressing the needs of mountain farmers so that even if we drape our city with any curtain, we can still be food sufficient.