The Philippines is an Agricultural Country, Yet Farmers Strive for Food, Contributed by @juvyjabian
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Ironic as it seems, but the Filipino farmers do not have proper food on their tables. It is so sad to think that the major producer of food in the market is the one belonging to the poverty line. The agricultural sector is one of the most marginalized groups of people in the Philippines, and the government seems to be insensitive to the case.
There are many factors contributing to the problem of poverty among the Filipino farmers. While they are interconnected with each other, they are listed according to their level of influence to the problem.
Landlessness
Majority of the Filipino farmers are landless and are working on the lands owned by the few landlords. According to the latest survey provided by the Ibon Foundation in the country, there are 75% of the total population of the Filipino farmers who do not own the lands they have been tilling for many years. Many of them are working as tenants and are underpaid. A great example is the Hacienda Luisita in Luzon, Philippines in which the tenants are hard to find decency being workers on the land.
There have already been many land reforms in the country, but none of them worked out. Landlessness persists, and many multinational corporations have kept on expanding on the lands tilled by the farmers. Even the Department of Agrarian Reform of the Philippines, 93% of the agricultural landholdings are private and are shared with the few names in the country. How is this connected to the poverty felt by the Filipino farmers?
When these lands are privately owned, the landlords would hire landless farmers with fixed salaries or according to the amount of goods produced from the human labor via 7-3 share in which the 7 shares go to the landlords while the remaining percent go to the workers. In fixed salaries, no matter how many goods a farmer can produce within a day, his/her below minimum wage would not be changed plus the exhausting hours exceeding the regular workhours.
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Debt-Ridden
This problem is an effect of landlessness to which the farmers with underpayment tend to lend money to be able to feed the family. Their income is not enough to supply the daily needs of their family. Such case causes them to seek jobs other than farming, but these jobs do not include those decent ones because most of them are uneducated and even illiterate.
Many of them only rent the farming equipment they use in the farm. When they cannot income enough, they would probably prioritize food rather than paying the rent, leading them to be debt-ridden.
Land Monopoly by Big Plantations
For instance in Bukidnon, Philippines where agricultural lands are so vast and majority of the settlers rely on resources found on the soil, multinational corporations such as the Del Monte Corporation and the Philippine Dole whose main operation is pineapple plantation are rampant. They keep on expanding their land coverage to lands tilled by poor farmers. From 2007 to 2016, big plantations grew up to 67% throughout the Philippines and, at the same time, 75% of the Filipino farmers have been displaced from their lands. Many of them are indigenous Filipinos living in the hinterlands and who only depend on farming (Ibon Foundation).
Poor Education
The educational attainment of the farmers is also a factor. Due to illiteracy and low education, these farmers cannot find decent jobs. At least they could have coped up with their problems as farmers if they could do other professional jobs. Jobs nowadays require such high educational attainment. Even college graduates are required to study master’s degree to be closer to getting hired. While majority of the Filipinos who are marginalized have poor education, the worst case scenario includes those who are in the agricultural sector.
7 out of 10 Filipino farmers lack proper education while only 1 percent of them reached college education (UMA, 2015). Moreover, these lucky farmers were only beneficiaries of scholarships offered by some politicians who are ambitious of higher positions in the government. The bad thing is that when these politicians fail in an election, this scholarship is gone with the exception of those who still maintain the funding and not regularly done. Many reports of these beneficiaries include delayed and cut allowances.
There are also foundations that support the Filipino farmers but only for their children to enrol in schools. Not to mention the names of these private institutions, nonetheless, one cannot sill lose hope for a better education.
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Little to No Support from the Government
There are many departments of the government that support the livelihood of these farmers. However, it seems like these are the ones putting them down into the realm of poverty. An example is the Department of Agrarian Reform that promised to redistribute lands to landless farmers as well as provide social and monetary services to starting farmers through the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program or the CARP.
It was never totally realized. Many vast lands were exempted from redistribution. These lands are mostly owned by the landlords who have positions in the government. There were only 20 percent of agricultural lands distributed plus these lands were already sold to big companies because the farmer could not sustain them due to lack of farming tools and poverty as well (KMP, 2016).
Bad Climate
Lastly, the Philippines is also part of the region where typhoons usually come across. Nearly 32 to 35 typhoons come to the country every year plus many storms (PAGASA, 2016). This led the farmers to suffer from crop destruction. Such case is a problem to Musuan farmers in Bukidnon who could barely harvest crops every 6 months when they are devastated with heavy storms. In other areas of the country, flooding happens in many rice fields.
Farming is the most important profession in the country, and the government should take care of every Filipino farmer. What is happening is that it is, instead, demoralizing them in a way that it allows landlords to monopolize the lands while displacing the farmers from their communities. Another hurtful fact is when the CARP of the government was used to attack the farmers, rather than helping them lift up their lives as what it should do to them. If the farmers could just be given importance, they could have improved the country’s economy better than any other sectors do.
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A revolution needs to happen out there for they are the people who deserve the power to feed themselves properly, the farmers are the basis of the economy. Maybe our Steemit platform could help them a great deal? Building a coop-style association would allow for the people of the country to regain their lands. They deserve it.
Thanks a lot for sharing this information with us, now it is time to remediate to the situation.
All for one and one for all! Namaste :)
Such a good idea @eric-boucher, certainly filipino farmers would love such developments. Unlike previous administrations, filipino farmers has a good chance to improve their lives with the current president of the republic. Aside from these future developments, I believe that trainings should be offer to them as part of nurturing themselves not only in the field of gaining skills in their respective agricultural areas but also to their personalities.
right!
Excellent comment! The farmers of India, having had to deal with fighting Monsanto and the such for the passed many years, have a lot to offer in this realm. Maybe the India Farmers Association could help them settle into healthier economic and psychological states?
Namaste :)
Blame it on the Filipinos that leave their country to live debt ridden lives in western countries. They leave their ancestral land to family relatives that don’t have a history of managing the property and waste it all. Life is not all fun and games as a “landlord”. People sue you for all kinds of stupid reasons. Out of the blue, a distant relative or maybe even a rotten child, will sue a landlord because his father didn’t give him the land but rather sold it. I won’t even get into the corruption of the legal system, from judge to mayor to tax assessor. There are many reasons farmers could choose to not own land but simply lease it or get paid to work the land.
Still a sharing of 7-3 is really low. I heard it’s usually 50-50. The landlord has supplies and taxes and bills to pay. My Lolo’s farmers seem to do quite well. Their children even go to college. When a farmer was sick with pneumonia, he paid the bill.
Funny how a lot of the solution is “government”. Government should take the land and just give it to them. That is the worst solution, and it stinks of communism, which has been proven to be a failure. Maybe all those who scream for revolution want no property laws, or better yet isis.
That was the problem that the current administration is trying to solve. As you can hear it in the news, duterte is trying to avoid western capitalization, which hopefully reverts the things that were done in the past.
This article is bullshit liberal media. Their solution is to hand over land to the farmers who by the articles own admission don’t know how to read or write. Then they complain big companies take over the land and make the people indentured servants. You don’t see the problem here?
The article is liberal propaganda, and everyone falls for it with upvotes. The problem here is everyone judges the life of a farmer from their perspective. Everyone here is like “omg these farmers look like they’re so poor and have flies all over their faces and eat insects. We have to do something. Oh get the government involved and give them land.”
These farmers are not as helpless as people perceive them to be, and the ones I’ve met have a pretty decent life, a life they chose by their own design. If anything this article degraded the very people they supposedly want to help in order to get more communist socialist programs.
its true :(( sad to say .. but let just support our farmers for they feed us ..
Education is the key
I totally agree !
A very sad situation for the Filipinos, you need to hold them. That they could not only afford food and help the poor.
i am a teacher and so i say, education is the key although I know that the poverty-education cycle is a vicious one. they are not educated because they are poor and they remain poor and the generations to follow because they are not educated. its a very difficult cycle to get out from and the government and advocates in the private sector are the keys in empowering them. its not too late. they need to be educated so they can be entrepreneurs and earn what they work hard for. there is hope.
They have a long history of being colonized in more recent centuries. Unfortunately, how do I put this, colonizing nations have little to no interest in uplifting those they conquer. As you point out this trend continues, and now they are exploiting fertile lands to make multi-nationals, businesspersons and connected political figures rich at the expense of the people. The huge economic disparity that exists there is cause for much strife. It is a travesty that sharecropping is a practice that exists in the 21st century.
The problem of indebted farmers is not unique to these lands, however, and the US and others have flooded global agricultural markets for decades, driving prices down and enforcing trade deals that are terrible for local people. Unfortunate consequences of this greed can be seen distorting the economies of many nations, and it can lead to disaster when farmers who are forced to farm cash crops meet up with price changes in commodities they grow, leading to even deeper cycles of poverty and hunger.
Thank you for bringing attention to this issue, it might be small to some, but we must remember that farming is the backbone of most modern civilizations, and we ought not take farmers for granted.
Indeed, they just arrived to take out everything and leave the moment its done. Like when the largest gold reserve of the country are now own by other countries.
Hard work is good for success
I wonder why some countries have alot of resources and still be deviate it. Like that of Philippines, remedy must be done to it as soon as possible.
One of the resources here in the Philippines that is not being maximized. Empower the farmers and modernize and equip the farming. That way we don’t have the import rice.