Philippine farmers feel the pinch
By Prime Sarmiento
BAGUIO CITY, Philippines - Cafe by the Ruins, a popular rustic restaurant
situated in Baguio City, the Philippines' famed mountain city resort, usually
caters to tourists and residents who enjoy sipping their cups of brewed coffee
while appreciating the artworks displayed on the cafe's stone walls.
These days, however, the quaint cafe is busy running a soup kitchen -
coordinating about a dozen staff and volunteers in cooking and delivering meals
to evacuees whose homes and farms were destroyed by Typhoon Parma.
Many of these evacuees are farmers whose lands have been ravaged by one of the
most devastating typhoons to hit their
homes and main source of livelihood in recent years.
Shortly after learning that the evacuees needed food, clothes and medicines,
manager Feliz Perez and the co-owners of the cafe - a group of entrepreneurs,
artists and art lovers - turned the cafe into a temporary relief center,
invited volunteers to help, and accepted donations of food, money and blankets
for the typhoon's victims.
The cafe has been delivering between 200 and 300 packed meals daily to evacuees
in Baguio and nearby towns in Benguet, a landlocked province in the Cordillera
Administrative Region (CAR), home to indigenous tribes collectively called
"Igorot".
Perez said the evacuees often request mung beans "because they are more
filling", alluding to the fact that most evacuees do not have immediate access
to food and thus need to eat something that will keep them full while waiting
for the next delivery of relief goods.
CAR encompasses most of the areas within the Cordillera Central mountain range
of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines. Blessed with fertile soil and
cool weather, farming is one of the region's key industries.
The farm folk of Cordillera supply vegetables and mountain-grown rice and
coffee to both local and international markets.
But the back-to-back typhoons - Ketsana and Parma - that swept through the
country in late September and early October changed the fortunes not only of
the Cordillera but other key food-producing provinces of Luzon.
One of these is Nueva Ecija, in central Luzon, the rice granary of the
Philippines. Lito Tambalo feels lucky enough that the floods did not destroy
the one-hectare of farmland that his family had been tilling for decades.
However, Parma did damage most of his rice crop.
"I'm supposed to thresh the rice that I just harvested, but I wasn't able to
dry the grain because of the rains," said the 40-year-old farmer. He added that
he was forced to sell his rice at a price that hardly raised enough to recover
his capital.
Even though the typhoons have left the country, Tambalo will not be able to
plant because most irrigation facilities have been damaged. Besides, he said,
the rains might just damage his harvest, which makes him hesitant to spend for
another cropping season, assuming he even has money to spare.
Philippine agriculture officials said the agriculture sector suffered the most
from the two cyclones. They placed the total damage to agriculture and
fisheries wrought by the two typhoons at 18.5 billion pesos (US$396 million).
The amount covers lost crops, fish and livestock, the damaged irrigation
facilities and 200,000 hectares of submerged land.
The impact of the two typhoons on Luzon was so huge that it forced Philippine
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap to downscale the country's farm growth rate to
between 0.5% and 1.5% from the previous target of 3%. Luzon accounts for
roughly 50% of the country's total farm output.
The worse part is that hunger and poverty now persist in what is supposed to be
the country's food basket. The once abundant farmlands are now heavily damaged
and may never be rehabilitated, depriving farmers of their main source of food
and livelihood.
In an economic forum held last week, Yap said that the two typhoons left more
than 50,000 farmer families in Luzon "in a state of financial ruin, hunger and
severe poverty".
Unless the government will provide loans and subsidies, it will be difficult
for these farmers to recover from this devastation, said Rolando Dy, executive
director of the Center for Food and Agribusiness at the University of Asia and
the Pacific (UA&P).
"These farmers lost everything," he said. Aside from the fact that their land
and irrigation system were destroyed, he added, they might also be deep in
debt, having borrowed money for planting crops. With their crops destroyed,
they will be hard put to repay their debts.
And while several non-governmental organizations, government agencies and
international organizations have been actively providing much-needed help to
these farmers, not all of them were benefiting from their donations, at least
during the first few days after the typhoon.
Santos Mero, deputy secretary general of the Cordillera People's Alliance
(CPA), a federation of indigenous people's organizations in northern Luzon,
said they could not send relief goods to other hard-hit Cordillera provinces
like Ifugao, Apayao and the Mountain Province, as the main road connecting
Baguio City were rendered unpassable by the slides brought about typhoon.
Mero said that over 2,000 farmer families in these areas are in dire need of
relief goods, which is why CPA is also helping the workers to clear the roads
so that they can send them basic supplies such as rice, cooking oil, soap and
clothes.
But Mero said that food donations are just palliative measures. What is more
important is to help these farmers get back on their feet and reclaim their
livelihood.
"The next step is rehabilitation. We'll be asking our member organizations and
the government to provide seeds and other farm inputs so that these farmers can
start over," he said.
Mero, along with and other farmers, may just get their wish. In a speech
delivered in an agricultural forum held last week, Philippine President Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo said that she had already directed Yap to distribute seeds to
farmers within this month. She added Yap would prioritize seed distribution to
areas that had not been severely affected by flooding to ensure that they can
be planted immediately.
UA&P's Dy welcomed the presidential directive, but noted that the
government assistance must come in as soon as possible so that the farmers can
plant and at least reclaim their capital.
In the meantime, the likes of Perez and Mero will continue cooking porridge and
boiled mung beans to temporarily stave off hunger, giving the evacuees strength
for another day.
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