Are we still in the business of creating hunger? Gardeners ask.
Disaster-Prone
We probably took it lightly then but it was a fact –the Philippines was top in the Global Climate Risk Index at a UN Climate Change Conference some five years ago.[1] It was a way of recognizing that in those years extreme weather events already accounted for 3,000 deaths and widespread destruction by mudslides and typhoons in the Philippines.
Apart from extreme weather, there was concern that increasing temperature would affect agricultural yields and food security, even as rising sea levels threatened over 40 million people or that big part (almost half) of our total population who live in coastal areas.
The prophets of global warming spoke clearly: warmer water in the top layer of the ocean drives more convection energy to fuel more powerful typhoons in increased frequency.
Global warming would cause more of both floods and droughts. Also, it would suck more moisture out of the soil and, as a consequence, increase desertification, and diminish agricultural productivity. Oh, but such talk was only for scientists, social activists and gardeners – until Ondoy, Pepeng, and Lupit Ramil decided to visit and linger a little while to teach us a few lessons. Today gardeners wonder if we still remember.
Ondoy was particularly nasty for bringing down some extras, namely, mud and garbage. The mud came from the mountains, washed down by rainwater that had free flow because no roots of trees were around to hold the soil together. The garbage, on the other hand, was added instructional bonus, coming as it did from the trash we had so arrogantly thrown around – clogging the waterways, making them so shallow and smelly and narrow and all-too-ready to overflow during heavy rains and to come back to haunt neighborhoods with old and new diseases for our endless discomfort.
Most important, however, was a food crisis arising from climate-related greatly diminished rice production and worse-affected food-price behaviors due to road-and-bridge destruction and heavy damage to pre-and-post-harvest facilities.
The need to “disaster-proof” government’s development policies, plans and programs became rather quickly the need of the hour. But was it that simple? Is it? When it comes to hunger and food insecurity, what is the bigger picture?
The bigger picture – the big land grab, the massive conversions
The United Nations has identified climate change, rural poverty and lack of sound agriculture policies by nations together with urban migration and pollution as the biggest threats to food security.
Declining agriculture labor force is slowing down food production. More and more rural folk move to cities for better paying jobs. This had already been happening in the Philippines where the exodus of rural folk to the cities was unprecedented, lured by job prospects not only in local cities but also overseas, leaving farms for more promising firms.
Highly developed countries for their part also convert lands to urban and industrial zones with the enticement of profits much greater than what agriculture can offer.
Or, alternatively, they go for the big land grab. Foreign governments and companies now hold more than 20 million hectares of farmland in the Third World countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia. Rich countries with not enough land think they could always buy their way into their poor neighbor’s properties or at least have them produce for you.
One can’t blame farmer leaders who say that before we know it, we may already have been taken over by other nations – America, China, Korea, Taiwan? These leaders may have heard announcements by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the past that so many agribusiness firms had been meeting with nearly 200 Philippine companies to form partnerships and joint ventures in fisheries, biofuels, processed goods, meat and poultry, dairy products, etc.
The DAR and similar agencies can’t even be sure, conveniently, how many thousands upon thousands of hectares have been converted over the past two decades and for uses other than food production. Since the 1990s, farm area planted to palay shrunk by more than 87,000 hectares while that of corn was reduced by almost 300,000 hectares. Can anyone deny that such decrease in farm area had to spell both massive displacement of Filipino farmers and dramatic decline in domestic food production?
On A Global Scale
The very first question in the FAQ of the United Nations’ World Food Program is: “(1) Is there a food shortage in he world?” And their blunt answer is: “There is enough food in the world today for everyone to have the nourishment necessary for a healthy and productive life.” Yes, indeed, enough food can be produced but it still must be bought. And if people are too poor to buy food at unaffordable prices, it will follow that they will also be hungry.
But, then, they also say in Number (3) :” Few people realize that there are over 1 billion hungry people in the world who don’t make the headlines. Number (4): Of the total number of over 1 billion chronically hungry people, over half are in Asia and the Pacific and a quarter is in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Does this include the Philippines?
On the world level, one billion hungry people is a first in human history. If anyone asks whether it is within our power and not beyond our expertise to consign this suffering to history, we must welcome the query warmly, immediately, with a clear resolve that we have to do what we can.
It is simply not fair but the fact is that the poor, who were least responsible for setting the financial crisis in motion, are now the least protected from its negative impact.
Imagining food security
From an imaginary standpoint, let us take a good look at the islands (yes, islands, we are not a land mass, unlike Thailand or China, and our population-to-arable land ratio is much lower) and some 100 million people hoping to be regularly fed from merely 12 million hectares of arable land. The people are increasing in numbers rather persuasively – at 2.5% per annum. God is allowing the making of more people. But He is not making new lands.
More significant, however, is the fact that we hardly use the lands He’s given us. We are bad stewards. We abuse those lands, we misuse them, we destroy them; we divide them up in the name of agrarian justice and we hardly use them properly. After harvesting one crop, do we plant another one?
No, it is still not common practice to multi-crop, or to crop-rotate. After one use, we’re done. In that one use, which may be more accurately termed “abuse,” we pour in the synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other toxin-generating chemicals made from scarce, non-renewable, and increasingly expensive fossil fuel. We reject the native, renewable, less-expensive-to-produce and healthful humus-enhancing organic type because there is little government subsidy there. Year in and year out we’ve done this, until there is very little humus left in many of our lands. We are, indeed, a funny lot.
Going back to our imaginary observation post, let’s look again at the lands and people. They are throwing away fruits and fish and vegetables. Why?
The harvest has been so good that the producers can’t get good enough prices for their products. From Trinidad Valley in Benguet to the fertile lands of typhoon-free Mindanao there is so much abundance and the result is big losses for the producer. That’s why he will not plant in the next round. What for? He just lost! And the consumer will be forced to import again, in a country that should logically be No.1 exporter of all kinds of agricultural goods.
This is the specific character of food insecurity in the Philippines today. We sure know how to produce – there’s no question about that. Production know-how is not our problem. When you talk of systems of rice intensification, and miracle seeds and wonderful hybrids, why, our scientists and technologists always take the gold medal. Our problem is not production but, rather, it is our almost complete ignorance or neglect of pre- and post-production actions and structures – our failure to install a food-security system.
Our post-harvest losses in food are a whopping 35%, much more than what we end up importing. It is time now – no one can disagree – that we start going back to basics and focus on the whole process from A to Z, to include not only production but also post-production stages. Of course, with the current “crisis” there will be again a superabundance of talk along these lines, as already happened many times in the past, but there seems to be no power existing to really walk the talk.
Needed: An AMS – An Agricultural Marketing Service
In this age of information, governments endeavor to keep their farmers well informed in real time. Ours doesn’t. We passed a law a decade ago called AFMA – the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act – because we all agreed that the Filipino farmer has to know what to plant, when to plant, how much to plant, where or on what soil, with what, what prices to expect for his produce, where to bring the product to in the immediate – in sum, to feel and act like a part of a real food system that goes beyond the agriculture sector to other sectors of the economy like transportation and construction and communication – with the goal of producing at lower costs and therefore selling at lower prices for consumers.
Food, then, produced in that context anywhere in this country can be made available everywhere at almost the same prices, or with minimum variance – simply because information can lead to appropriate actions.
Information can lead to timely orders, timely preparations for storage and transportation, – the works. Information can prevent so much unnecessary importations. In fact, with the correct and timely information on soil and seed and market outlets the Filipino farmer can produce up to 6 tons of rice per hectare rather than the 2.8 averages that he does today. And that is just for starters. Hundreds of master farmers are already doing this with very little external support.
The information system that has still to be put in place is often called elsewhere the Agricultural Marketing Service or AMS. This is the secret of countries like capitalist America, or communist China, or mixed economy Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, India, and even Indonesia – an open secret hitherto hardly understood by Filipinos and known in those countries by almost the same name: the Agricultural Marketing Service. It is really – and should be – an agricultural and food intelligence agency: something our text-addicted population could really get into. India has done so with lots of success.
For our part, however, we are only always beginning to organize this service in our country: to look at the supply-demand situation in the Philippines as a whole and in the context of the world we live in; to value and seek and disseminate market information in a way that makes possible rational production; to construct cold chains of freezers and chillers in key localities so that our fish can be fresh frozen and made available for consumption even months after they are caught; to establish a grain highway of silos and warehouses and dryers and to establish a nautical highway of ro-ro friendly ports in a country that is not a land mass but an archipelago – in sum, to have a national post-production system that liberates agriculture from a merely subsistence mode to one that is integrated with the larger economy and serves as the solid foundation of industrialization. In all these matters we are perpetually inchoate. Follow through that is a mark of enlightened and strong governance hardly exists.
Irrigation
Only about twenty-nine percent of all actually irrigable rice lands are effectively irrigated. This is about 1.34 million hectares in all. Thailand’s 7-million hectares are. And yet our limited irrigated lands already produce 60% of all the rice produced in the country. So, with a little focus on the matter of irrigation, we should be looking to exporting rather than importing rice in no time at all, rice being a short-term crop. But do we even have that focus now? No? Then we should wonder: there must be something quite profitable in importing rice or how explain the phenomenon of increased importation from 150 metric tons in 1995 to 620 metric tons in 2000 to 2.2-million metric tons (required) in 2008 to almost a million still today.
The goal of our country is development – “populorum progressio,” to quote the famous encyclical of some 40 years ago. Development is development of people: our increased living standards and improved quality of life – “to have more and be more”. Admittedly, as the history of civilizations has shown, it is industry that provides goods, services and material comforts to improve living standards. And it is the complex of social values such as human dignity, self-reliance and gainful employment for every person that sets the quality of life. But this kind of development can only come by generating, mobilizing and optimally utilizing natural and human resources, natural genius and skills and maximizing their returns.
The question then arises as to how to maximize the returns, let us say, for a hectare of land. On land, we have soil, water, forest or agricultural crop, animals and people – under a given climate. How to maximize the returns for these resources is an issue.
How to grow more crops and get better yields is one thing: soil-water management, better seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and farming techniques have increased production. But these often involved high-energy inputs and great costs to environmental integrity and the integrity of creation.
The emerging technologies like tissue culture, genetic engineering etc. likewise offer great promise. Nonetheless, the perception remains regarding the predicament of diminishing returns to labor in agriculture on one hand and low employment elasticity in large-scale manufacturing on the other hand. It is rural industrialization that will provide an escape from this predicament – and, again, our laws, like the CARL, provide this in pure theory – something never meant to be put into practice.
Rural people live on land and agricultural development should have a nexus with industry and transform the industrial mode of production to one that is friendly with Earth. In theory, all our food and agriculture-related laws talk about this necessary nexus making rural development and industrialization the very purpose, say, of agrarian reforms. In practice, however, there has been very little understanding and therefore very little effort systematically to bring that nexus about. Until we have achieved this – quite sorry to say, we would still be in the business of creating hunger. FINIS
Charles Avila
The Gardener
[1] Held in Bali, Indonesia