Soil is any farmer’s most valuable working capital – Howard Buffet
Negros as the “Organic Food Bowl of Asia,” may not be in trouble as far as the supply of agricultural production for food consumption is concerned. What is deeply troubling for the province and its stakeholders and practitioners, especially the small farmers, are practitioners who pretend to be genuinely pursuing organic practices and advocating the principles of fair trade, but actually betray them. Pity those who have entrusted them with a relationship that was supposed to be built under the principles of organic farming and fair trade practices as reasons for their existence in the first place.
I have worked and devoted more than half of my life to NGO work largely with ARBs and the sugar workers of Negros, and more than 30 years of this stands witness to their courage and perseverance to this day. This perseverance and courage was agitated by the sugar crisis in the 1980s, since the day they were born, sugarcane literally became part of their umbilical cord. Give or take, the highs and lows of the sugar industry put most of them in the quagmire of poverty yet as small agrarian reform beneficiaries after acquiring sugar lands from the old owners, but not without conflicts and violence due to resistance also served as their ticket to overcome poverty. For many of them, it was a socio-economic breakthrough.
Believing that government services and programs are not enough to support the thousands of farmers and ARBs mainly in the sugarcane production – NGOs and alternative business organizations came to existence as their major partners to facilitate the market of their product as their main source of livelihood. In the late 80s towards the 1990s, partnerships were built, starting from local and reaching as far as the international level where sugarcane played a major part among the small ARB’s of Negros. The province being the sugar capital of the country created a bandwagon not only in the mainstream market of sugar but even in the alternative sphere where sugar was “rebranded” as the people’s product that solidified an international “movement” among like-minded groups and individuals across Asia and Europe.
TWISTED REALITY
The “magnet” of the sugar crisis for aid has now turned into a trading relationship which is by principle a product of ingenuity that spells self-reliance rather than dependence. The established relationship resulted in an increase in demand of the imported product produced by the ARBs, who are now called small producers. However, this reality, a supposed evolution where adaptability and changes are inevitable, was ignored by the very institutions who are supposed to uphold the principles of organic farming and fair trade. Practices were twisted and became a norm, downright betraying the market and consumers’ trust and confidence in the name of profit and survival, more than building a strong alternative relationship based on organic farming and fair trade principles.
Instead of skills, knowledge, facility and re-investment, and production improvement, what happened was producers and personnel were taught to lie and fabricate documents on table and organic and natural farming practices remain an illusion and propaganda dictum of advocates and supposed leaders. A false “reality” now exists in institutions where leaders shamelessly conclude that “we are now in a point of no return.” Unfortunately, some producer groups, out of necessity and survival, remain deaf and mute and at times took the gall to defend this twisted fate that for the rest of their lives including their next generation will inherit. A legacy they will endure under the cloak of “genuine people’s development”.
DUTY-BOUND, ACCOUNTABILITY
I do not think this helps the province of Negros Occidental as the “Organic Food Bowl of Asia” when right under its nose there are institutions that tarnish its image. The government, be it local or national and their instrumentalities as stakeholders along this important concern must go against fraudulent practices, much more if it has reached an international level, because this will not only put the province but the whole Filipino in a bad light. It is imperative that as a major stakeholder, the government must be duty-bound to put a stop against these kinds of malpractices and seek accountability.
And, with respect to due process, an investigation must be underway especially when the ARBs or the small producers themselves are the ones who take the cudgels in pursuit for transparency, fairness and most of all – the integrity of their product.*
