It’s time to harvest mature nuts from my 60 coco trees and dry them for copra purposes. At 20 pesos per kg, I could hardly stretch for the wages of my landless farmhands. How I wish our government could do something to increase the buying price fair enough.
In those 48 words, Mr Tejada has captured much of the essentials of what ails Philippine Agriculture today – actually, what have been ailing this country’s farms and farming families:
Persistent Poverty.
It is very convenient to point to low prices of farm produce as the reason why farmers remain poor despite being industrious and persistent. All these we can glean from Mr Tejada’s Coconut Complaint:
(1) His harvests of coconuts are for making copra only, no more.
(2) He looks at his farm only as a coconut grove of 60 trees.
(3) His farmhands rely only on the wages he gives them, seemingly.
(4) Those coco farmhands are landless – that’s another problem.
For one, Mr Tejada seems not to have been looking at possibilities other than relying on his own copra-making to make a living for his coco hands. Why not coconut water and fresh buko?
For another, a coconut grove can be planted to other farm crops, as the image does show (intercropping image from PNGWing[1]). Those crops can be the sources of major incomes than the coconut, if only they were taken good care of.
So, I have found the proverbial Filipino Juan Tamad – Johnny The Lazy – It is the coconut farmer!
More. Mr Tejada’s farmhands can raise native chickens in the meantime that they wait for the nuts to become ready to harvest. Those native birds are easy to raise – all they need is a little attention.
And no: Landlessness is not the problem that those who believe in agrarian reform believe – lack of land ownership is not the shackle that binds the farmers to poverty:
The farmers are poor because of themselves.
And because of us!
The farmers insist on borrowing from usurers, even if they know that each usurer is like Shakespeare’s Shylock always wanting to exact his pound of flesh from those who cannot pay back their loans sooner, or later. That is why I have been campaigning for supercharged multipurpose cooperatives – I call them “Super Coops” – to help farmer members do their farming, from buying seeds to selling their produce and gaining enough returns for respectable, sustainable lives.
Land ownership does not get you anywhere, just like the poor farmers who have had their lands since Martial Law – no improved lives. Division is not the answer; Subdivision is – you create a collection of farms and consolidate your operations. Another way of putting that is from Secretary of Agriculture William Dar: farm clustering (see my essay, “The New 7 Arts Of War – Against PH Farmer Poverty, Via Clustering[2],” 05 August 2020, THiNK Journalism).
Mr Tejada, a coconut grove is a cluster not only of trees but opportunities!@517
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