‘We’ve seen how easy it is to forget promises’

(Editor’s Note: Starting today, the Inquirer is coming out with a series profiling the plight of six disadvantaged basic sectors of society—farmers, fisherfolk, senior citizens, persons with disabilities, minimum wage laborers and overseas Filipino workers—as their situations have been high on the governance priorities of the presidential candidates. Jejomar Binay, Rodrigo Duterte, Grace Poe, Mar Roxas and Miriam Defensor Santiago have vowed to increase the productivity of the sectors while promising them poverty alleviation programs, such as cash doles and subsidies.)

(First of a series)

When Filipinos go out to vote on May 9, farmers can only hope to wake up to a new day when the seeds they plant will not only bring food to every Filipino’s table but optimism as well for their future.

For farmer Estrelita Mariano, or Ka Lita, 56, elections are tiring. She is the eldest child in a poor family of tillers in Barangay San Andres I in Quezon, Nueva Ecija province.

When asked by the Inquirer about their stand on the country’s most pressing issues, all five presidential candidates vowed to ensure food security and increase agricultural production, especially as hunger remains a pervasive challenge in the country. According to a Pulse Asia survey in December, 40 percent of Filipinos considered “having enough to eat” daily among their biggest problems.

“If you want to be poor, be a farmer,” said Ka Lita, a former deputy secretary and founding member of Amihan (National Federation of Peasant Women).

She and other women farmers have long stood against unequal rights and gender pay gaps in the agricultural sector, but they know that gender issues are part of a bigger political landscape. They have sought for policy changes and development alternatives from the government to push for food security and sustainable agriculture.

In her years of struggle, Ka Lita can only hope that the next President will give priority to her sector. But hearing promises to help farmers and watching those words die a natural death later is another cycle she is accustomed to.

“The next President needs to develop the countryside in order to improve the lives of our farmers,” she said. “But of course, we’ve seen how easy it is to forget promises made during the campaign once they assume office.”

Agrarian reform

She lamented that although generations of presidents had their so-called genuine agrarian reforms, decades passed and they still could not call the land they till their own.

Under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, a farmer needs to pay the land she tills for 30 years. “But the rising expenses and decreasing produce prevent us from paying our dues to Landbank,” Ka Lita said.

Sec. 11 of Republic Act No. 9700, or the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reform (Carper), says nonpayment of amortization for three years would forfeit the awarding of the land. The farmer would also be permanently disqualified from becoming a beneficiary under Carper.

Peasant life in the Philippines is a cycle of debt. A farmer who owns a hectare of land earns only around P16,500 half a year, or P91 a day—which is less than one-third of P304, the amount needed for a family of five to meet food and nonfood needs, according to national statistics.

Drought and typhoons

To sell their crops to the market, they have to borrow funds ahead of the harvest. When a disaster strikes, such as long periods of drought, periodic typhoons or pests, they need to look for money to buy new seeds and start anew.

Between 2007 and 2008, a strong El Niño affected farms around the world, drastically affecting harvests and pushing up prices of commodities, including rice. Farmlands in Luzon were not spared, including Ka Lita’s.

“Our fields were dry and full of big cracks. Our rice plants were so short that only a lone rice stalk was able to bear palay. We earned nothing that year,” she said.

However, Ka Lita said farmers could not just stop working even after disasters strike because they still had to shell out money for farming expenses, as well as land amortization. “Otherwise, our families and the Filipinos will have no food to eat,” she said.

The dry months of March to May would have been a good time to harvest palay for the second cropping season. Ka Lita, however, shifted to planting vegetables, which requires less water. Irrigation has not reached portions of their land for months.

Irrigation woes

Ka Lita’s hometown, Quezon, is under the National Irrigation Administration-Upper Pampanga River Integrated Irrigation System (NIA-Upriis), which irrigates 452 barangays of Nueva Ecija, Tarlac, Bulacan and Pampanga provinces.

“There are parts of our barangay that are still not irrigated, since we are at the far end of the Pantabangan reservoir (the main source of water supply of Upriis),” she said, referring to parched portions of land where her ampalaya (bitter gourd) crops bore no fruits.

Maintaining proper irrigation in the fields of San Andres I is a catch-22 for the farmers and the government: Due to low harvest, farmers could not pay the irrigation service fee (ISF) to the irrigators association which monitors and maintains proper distribution of water supply.

The ISF is computed based on the number of cavans harvested by farmers, multiplied with 50 kilograms per cavan and the prevailing government support price set by the National Food Authority.

For her family’s 2-hectare land, Ka Lita said they would pay the irrigators five and six cavans of palay during dry and rainy months, respectively, even if their farms were not fully irrigated—an already large share of a farmer’s average harvest of 90 cavans per crop season.

“When farmers do not pay the irrigation rent, the irrigators do not get their income, thus they do not feel the motivation to do their jobs,” she said.

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, farmers and fisherfolk, and their children, consistently posted the highest poverty incidences among the nine basic sectors in the country.

Poor, landless, indebted

It’s easy to fit Ka Lita in the frame of a farmer known to people from the center: poor, landless, indebted. But she dared to break the cycle.

She and her husband Paeng did all they can to send their children to college. She named her only daughter Mendiola, after the 1987 Mendiola massacre where farmers were killed after a violent dispersal of protesters demanding the fulfillment of the promises on land reform of then President Corazon Aquino.

She lamented the fact that families of farmers often resort to sharing a piece of land—from parents to children and their grandchildren—because they know nothing else to do for a living. This translates to a smaller ratio of production and a cycle of poverty.

“If the children of farmers could have a decent education, there would be other sources of income for their families. They could be away from the fields finding other jobs. But oftentimes, they end up being farmers, poor farmers,” Ka Lita said.

She dreams of seeing farmers’ sons and daughters become teachers, engineers and professionals. She hopes peasant parents may find it easier to one day see their children holding pens and papers instead of seeds and sickles.

Ka Lita longs for the time when the country becomes a top rice producer again and a pioneer of rice research and development. She said it is a tragedy for the Philippines, an agricultural country, to become one of the biggest rice importers.

“Our next President should prioritize the development of its local production and be rice self-sufficient if it really wants to see the country prosper,” Ka Lita said. “If the country depends on its neighbors, what will happen if those neighbors won’t give you food the next time you ask?”

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