BAGUIO CITY – Learn from China.

This was the advice of a Philippines-China solidarity group to Benguet’s vegetable farmers if they wanted to improve their farming techniques to be able to compete in the global market.

“If you compare the vegetables from China and the ones we produce in the Philippines, the ones from China are bigger, greener and packaged well. [Many] Chinese farmers do not use fertilizers but they produce so much and we want to find out how they do it without using fertilizers,” said Dr. Charles Cheng, a chapter member of the Association for Philippine-China Understanding.

Chinese farmers use soybeans as fertilizers, but the Benguet farmers want to know if this is indeed effective in improving their vegetable production, Cheng said.

Vegetables produced in China, such as pechay, carrots, cabbage and potato, have continued to enter the country and have competed with locally grown vegetables.

Cheng said his group had asked the provincial government to help it send at least 10 farmers to China to learn new vegetable farming technology. He said the cost of transportation and other expenses had discouraged them from pursuing the study tour.

The Chinese-Filipino community wants the local farmers to improve their production since it was the Chinese migrants who introduced farmers in Benguet to vegetable planting in the early 1900s, he said.

According to the book, “The Ethnic Chinese in Baguio and in the Cordillera Philippines,” authored by Cheng and Katherine Bersamira, the Chinese pioneers brought agricultural practices to highland farming, such as composting, recycling of organic matter, crop rotation and residue usage, proper tillage of soil, irrigation and natural pest control.

The Chinese farmers also introduced several varieties of vegetables, such as cabbage, pechay, broccoli, lettuce, kangkong, celery and carrots, and ornamental plants to upland farms here.

A farmers’ group in the Cordillera has also looked into foreign practices to improve the local farmers’ yield.

Fernando Bagyan, secretariat member of Apit-Tako, said a network with farmers’ groups in Cuba was being formed so it could learn from their land reform program and farming techniques.

“Their farms have become very self-sufficient and really address the food security of the people. We want to learn about their organic pesticide so farmers here will not use chemicals anymore,” Bagyan said.