The Philippine Online Chronicles

“Magtanim ay di biro…” Everyone knows that farming is no laughing matter, but up to now, agriculture is still the butt of the overdrawn joke that the government and land owners are playing on the millions of Filipinos who rely on agriculture for a living.

What the country is

Selective memory and forgetfulness have always been one of the characteristics of the Philippine administration. For a country that is largely composed of farmers and agricultural workers, the meager attention and budget allotted to the field of agriculture is a puzzle that has never quite been resolved. Even the most conservative figures peg 40 percent of the population as living in rural areas working as farmers and agriculturalists. A large chunk of the gross domestic product, pegged at at least 20 percent, comes from the agricultural output of the country. But up to now, no administration in the Philippines has placed agriculture on top of the economic agenda.

What the country wants to be

In reality, there is nothing wrong with becoming an agricultural country focused intensively on farming. For an archipelago with plenty of fertile lands for farming, lands for livestock, and hundreds upon hundreds of miles of shorelines where people can engage in fishery, why agriculture as an occupation should stay so low on the list of our politicians’ priorities depends not on the actual output that agriculture has – after all, agriculture is profitable – but on the economic and social policies that are in place in the country.

‘Industrial’ fantasies

As early as in the 1990s, Ramos has put forth the idea of an industrialized Philippines. The idea of an industrialized Philippines probably puts forward images of great cities springing up and dotting the archipelago, with towering buildings, infrastructures, and a white-collar society all with their own little offices in the city. The industrialized Philippines that the administrations up to Noynoy Aquino have been dreaming of is never exactly what it seems, however. Just as there is nothing wrong with an agricultural country, there is nothing inherently wrong with an industrialized country as well. The problem, however, is that when politicians talk about industrialization, what they actually mean is plunging the country and its economy into a policy of exportation of raw materials and reliance on imported goods. The administration’s vision of an industrialized Philippines is not so much industrialized as dependent on other countries that have actually succeeded in industrialization. Building actual industries isn’t quite what politicians have in mind when talking of industrialization.

What all of this means is that in the grand scheme of things, the country is reduced to a satellite resource-land where foreign countries can extract raw materials for processing, and as a fringe benefit, maybe use the cheap labor peddled by the government via its oppressive labor laws for manufacturing. And once processed, the raw materials are returned as high-priced goods that are retailed and sold right back to us at very steep prices, if not overseas with profits that we equally do not get any share of. And it is not just in terms of raw materials that this is happening, but in terms of human resources as well. Think of the trends in education, ranging from the information technology boom that has given way to various IT schools in the country so that we can export programmers and developers to other countries. Or just recently, the nursing boom that has transformed nursing as the number one course for high school students to take up in college. There is nothing industrialized about all this – the Philippines is left with no actual industries for its own, and whatever industries are actually situated in the Philippines are mainly for processing goods for export, owned by multinational companies.

Short-sighted

In other words, the reason why the Philippine administration has always been focused away from agriculture and into the myth of industrialization is because of the continuing pandering of our political leaders to foreign countries and multinational companies. The short term advantages are clear as day – foreign investors love developing countries such as the Philippines, all ripe for ‘development,’ resource exploration, and resource extraction. This is the very reason why Arroyo’s administration has been championed in the field of economy – because of the immense investments that has been poured into the country during her term. In the long run, however, nothing actually changes. The investments come and go, but none stay in the country precisely because the investments are not on the country itself and not on the Filipino people themselves, but on their resources. Once the resources have been extracted, once the multinational companies’ and the foreign countries’ needs have been met, the contracts end, the investors up and leave, and the Philippines is left as industrialized as when it started. In other words, the Philippines is left to its neglected farmlands, contractual workers, and landless farmers.

What can agriculture actually do?

What exactly does focusing on agriculture do to the country? What exactly does agriculture bring to the table that the present attempts at ‘industrialization’ doesn’t? For one, agriculture is a proven source of income for the country. The Philippines has the capacity to deliver agricultural goods around the globe, and in fact it does. Some of the popular agricultural exports of the country include pineapples, bananas, coconut products, prawns, and tuna which are exported from Japan to the United States and Europe. Focusing on developing agriculture will allow the country to generate more income based on the fruits of our own land. More importantly, however, focusing on agriculture allows the country to be more self-reliant and able to provide for its basic needs.

Agriculture alternatives in perspective

One can argue that the present focus on alternatives to agriculture such as business process outsourcing and OFWs are also a good way to generate income. The problem, however, is the BPOs and OFWs do not really trickle down to the population at large. Only a small percentage of the population actually get a pie of the BPO money. Most BPO centers are located in cities, and the few outsourcing centers that manage to stray away into the provinces pay with the notoriously low provincial rates. What it boils down to is that the bulk of the population residing in the provinces, in the farmlands, at the seashores, do not get a share of this. This also applies in the case of OFWs. OFWs’ families definitely experience firsthand the trickling dollars, but in the end, there are only four to five million Filipinos overseas, according to the CIA reports. These 4-5 million Filipinos may seem a lot, but this figure only represents a very small segment of the entire Philippine population that has now passed the 94M mark.

By focusing on agriculture, the divide between rich and poor in the Philippines has better chances of finding resolution. Naturally, however, this requires not just focus on developing agricultural techniques to increase production, but also involves changing the entire agricultural scheme at play in the country. Take farming for example. Farming is the dominant form of agriculture at play in the Philippines. Most Filipino farmers, however, are ironically saddled with landlessness. Bulk of the lands in the Philippines are owned by a few elite families who are able to maximize the agricultural potential of the land without having to dole out the labor necessary for farming to be possible. In some cases, as little as 20 percent of the yield goes to the actual farmers who have invested time and labor for tilling the land, while the rest of the profits goes to the millers and land owners covered by nothing more than titular legalities of ownership.

Like the protagonist in the telenovelas that are such a hit in prime time television, the Philippines and agriculture are a perfect pair that turned into star-crossed lovers because of manipulative machinations of the men in power in the political administration and the big businesses. After many long years, however, it is time for the drama to come to an end and for the administration to give the due focus on the lowly magsasaka an mangingisda.

Santiago blogs at moreadventure.wordpress.com. He lives in Manila.

Photos from POC Politi-ko. Some rights reserved.