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IT was noon of Saturday, March 29. The sun was burning through the
GI sheets of the barangay chapel of Concepcion, Lubao, Pampanga, but
the sweating crowd in the chapel was unmindful of the heat. They
were farmers with weather-beaten faces and callused hands, used to
this kind of torture. At least, inside the chapel, there was a roof
between them and the sun.
From town to town, it was this kind crowd in
that gathered to listen to Butil Rep. Ka Nellie Chavez, who has
been moving from one farming town to another in Central Luzon to
explain the issues around the current rice crisis. They were farmers
hungry for attention from government, unmindful of the heat,
attentive to every word from anyone who remotely represented
government and on this hot Saturday noon this was Ka Nellie Chavez.
Those aware of the bloody and tumultuous
agrarian history of the region cannot but contrast the patient,
collaborative mood of the current generation of Central Luzon
farmers with the surly, defiant mood of the farmers before us.
In half a generation, nothing but shards of
memories have been left of the rebellion-bent farmers of the region
that defied and almost overthrew a government. There is not much
written account of that period either. It was as if the years just
leaped and lapsed, and their passage obliterated everything
connected with those bloody years when farmers felt they could
change the inequitable agrarian condition by burning the mansions of
their landowners and decapitating the landlords that strayed into
their rampaging path.
Time has soothed and smoothened everything, from
the smallest agrarian warts to the deepest wounds that our aggrieved
fathers carried. At the very same spot in Concepcion, Lubao, where
the farmers, including myself, gathered to listen to Ka Nellie
Chavez on ways to improve our rice production technologies.,
farmers, just half a generation ago, talked in hushed and subdued
tones about toppling a government and replacing it with one led by
the farmers and the ploretariat.
On this very same spot just half a generation
ago, scores of farmers bade their families goodbye to join the Huks
up in the Carballo and the Sierra Madre. The wives and next of kin
vowed, in turn, to be couriers of food and information to the
departing insurgents.
The women left behind took care of the infants,
putting them under a commune, with the instruction that they should
be raised as brothers and sisters. Their fathers were comrades in a
struggle, their kids cannot but share that bond.
The kids in those communes were put to sleep on
long, rattan cribs with the haunting lyrics of the guerilla songs,
about fighting men out to liberate a prostrate country. They sucked
cheap milk from one cheap infant milk bottle that was passed around,
more out of scarcity rather than nurturing their kinship. The women,
however, were banned from humming the songs when they slip into the
poblacion to buy drugs and medicine for the wounded up in the
mountains. These women, too, had mastered the art of evading the
dragnets of the konstabularyo.
The radical shift in the bent, mood and
inclination of the Central Luzon farmers in just half a generation
has it upside and downside.
Farmers are no longer a headache of governments.
They would rather source out hybrid seeds and haggle over fertilizer
prices than attend politically-charged gatherings.
They would rather attend seminars on modern
farming techniques than on ideological teach-ins.
They would rather diversify on their
activities—crops, hog, poultry and aquaculture—than intensify
their commitment to a single political cause.
The docility and the timidity, well-noticed by
governments, have left the farmers out of government focus and
attention. They are given token attention. Focus on agriculture has
been essentially all talk but without the complementary action
programs and funding.
While governments in OECD countries tremble at
the sight of angry farmers and are quick in granting all the support
and subsidies they want to keep them happy, contented and secure,
Philippine governments, past and present, completely ignore the
farmers and their leaders, including basic and legitimate demands.
In the farming areas, government is absent all
of the time.
Under the rules of the World Trade Organization,
the very same exponent of agricultural liberalization and
competition, countries are allowed to give their agriculture sectors
a level of support that is equivalent to 10 per cent of the gross
value added (GVA) of the agriculture sector of the member-country.
Here it is zero.
mvrong@yahoo.com
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