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By Conrad M. Cariño Senior
Desk Editor
Ka Ben used to plant rice in his
three-hectare farm in Tarlac. He gave up rice farming three years
ago.
“It’s back-breaking work, and
the earnings are not good because the rice traders are predatory,”
Ka Ben said.
He shifted to corn, which gave
him bigger earnings. A multinational company processing animal feeds
bought his corn at a higher price.
Today, Ka Ben looks forward to a
bonanza—but not from farming. “Real estate developers want to
buy my land. I can earn P1 million right away. My sons and daughters
need money for college,” he said. Ka Ben’s fields are in the
vast area where urban development will take place after the
Subic-Tarlac Expressway opens.
Another farmer, Ka Cesar, sees no
future in rice farming. From planting rice and corn alternately in
Isabela, Ka Cesar is now in Southern Luzon planting biofuel crops,
because “it’s more profitable.”
Ka Ben and Cesar are not unique.
There are many thousands of them, which is very bad news for a
country seeking 100-percent rice self-sufficiency.
In an interview with The Manila
Times, Muslim farmer Nasser Halipa said that because rice yields in
the Philippines per hectare is low, many farmers prefer to plant
other crops.
He said rice farming can earn a
farmer from P10,000 to P30,000 per cropping season, which is hardly
enough to sustain a decent living for a large family even in rural
areas.
But vegetable farming which is
less “back-breaking” can bring as much as double the earnings
from rice farming. While media reports hype land conversion as a
major cause of the country’s insufficiency in rice production,
“crop shifting” may actually be a bigger cause of the rice
crisis.
In Davao City in 2007,
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap revealed that 11,000 hectares of
rice lands have been converted to banana plantations these past few
years. Mindanao farmers were attracted to the better earnings from
bananas for export.
More tragic is that the children
of Ka Ben, Ka Cesar, Halipa and thousands of other rice farmers will
never go into rice farming. They will join the urban labor force or
work abroad. Ka Cesar’s only daughter is about to finish her
nursing studies at a university in Metro Manila. She wants to work
in the United States.
Vanishing breed
Sonny Domingo, a farmer leader
and a former consultant of the Congressional Commission on
Agricultural Modernization, said that for the country to be
self-sufficient in rice in the future, the sons of rice farmers
should be ready to take over from their fathers.
This is a tough call. Farming
other crops like vegetables, corn or biofuel plants can be more
profitable.
A survey on the average age of
Filipino rice farmers will likely find that most are elderly or
seniors. This means most rice farmers will be retiring in the next
five to 10 years.
Domingo explained in a paper that
while the rice industry is worth about P80 billion per year,
non-farmers like traders, are getting the bigger part of the
pie—up to P50 billion. This means the nation’s toiling rice
farmers and their families, many of them living below poverty level,
share the smaller slice. Rice farmers are the majority of
agricultural labor, which makes up one-third of the total labor
force.
Traders control rice
Traders have the financial might
that allows them to lend to cash-strapped rice farmers during the
pre-planting season. This locks them into a vicious cycle, because
it is also the traders who buy—at a price they dictate—the
farmers’ produce.
Ka Cesar said farmers borrowing
from traders are prevalent, for banks rarely bother with farmers
applying for loans.
If the rice farmer is hit by crop
failure brought about by pestilence, bad weather or sometimes both,
he gets buried deeper in debt to the trader.
In the past, government tried to
extend loans to all farmers, through direct lending or through
farming or rural-based cooperatives. But Filipino farmers have a
record of being poor debt payers, with banks and cooperatives
reporting a collection rate of only around 5 percent.
This does not mean, however, that
rice farming cannot be profitable, and that farmers cannot be good
bank clients. During the Marcos regime’s Masagana 99 years, the
banks’ average collection rate from rice farmers was an astounding
85 percent.
New type of farmers
Fortunately, a new type of rice
farmers is emerging. Some of them have incomes better than urban
employees.
One such is Rosalie Ellasus. A
college degree holder who had worked for a local corporation and
then became an overseas Filipino worker (OFW), she decided to try
her hand in rice farming.
Sources from SL Agritech said
Ellasus operates a five-hectare rice farm in Pangasinan and earns
about P87,000 per hectare per cropping season from her rice farm, or
P435,000 from her five-hectare land per cropping season.
Her palay (unhusked rice) yield
per hectare per cropping is more than 12 metric tons, which is way
above the national average of three to four metric tons per hectare,
per cropping.
What sets Ellasus apart from many
traditional rice farmers is her respect for knowledge. In 2000, she
attended lectures from the Farmers’ Field Schools of the
Department of Agriculture, where she learned how to plant rice more
efficiently.
She is one of the many farmers
who have adopted hybrid seeds and organic farming practices. Banks
do not see modern farmers, like Ellasus, as “high-risk”
borrowers.
There are no statistics on how
many former OFWs or scientifically minded office workers have taken
up rice farming. But if many will replicate Ellasus’ experience,
there will soon be a new generation of more fortunate rice farmers
than the vanishing breed of traditional farmers.
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