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PHILIPPINES: Storm-weary Farmers Suffer Huge Losses
By Prime Sarmiento
BAGUIO CITY, Philippines, Oct 21 (IPS) - Café by the Ruins, a popular rustic restaurant situated in Baguio City, the
Philippines' famed mountain city resort, usually caters to tourists and residents
who enjoy sipping their cups of brewed coffee while appreciating the artworks
displayed on the café’s stone walls.
These days, however, the quaint café is busy running a soup kitchen –
coordinating about a dozen café staff and volunteers in cooking and
delivering meals to evacuees whose homes and farms were destroyed by
Typhoon ‘Parma’.
Many of these evacuees are farmers whose lands have been ravaged by one of
the most devastating typhoons to hit their homes and main source of
livelihood in recent years.
Shortly after learning that the evacuees needed food, clothes and medicines,
manager Feliz Perez and the co-owners of the café — a group of
entrepreneurs, artists and art lovers — turned the café into a temporary relief
center, invited volunteers to help, and accepted donations of food, money and
blankets for the typhoon's victims.
The café has been delivering between 200 and 300 packed meals daily to
evacuees in Baguio and nearby towns in Benguet, a landlocked province in
the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), home to indigenous tribes
collectively called ‘Igorot’.
Perez said the evacuees often request mung beans "because they are more
filling," alluding to the fact that most evacuees do not have immediate access
to food and thus need to eat something that will keep them full while waiting
for the next delivery of relief goods.
CAR encompasses most of the areas within the Cordillera Central mountain
range of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines. Blessed with fertile soil
and cool weather, farming is one of the region's key industries.
The farm folk of Cordillera supply vegetables and mountain-grown rice and
coffee to both local and international markets.
But the back-to-back typhoons — ‘Ketsana’ and ‘Parma’ — that swept
through the country in late September and early October changed the
fortunes not only of the Cordillera but other key food-producing provinces of
Luzon.
One of these is Nueva Ecija, in Central Luzon, the rice granary of the
Philippines. Lito Tambalo feels lucky enough that the floods did not destroy
the one-hectare farmland that his family had been tilling for decades.
However, Parma damaged most of his rice crop.
"I'm supposed to thresh the rice that I just harvested, but I wasn't able to dry
the grain because of the rains," said the 40-year-old farmer. He added that
he was forced to sell his rice at a price hardly enough to recover his capital.
Even if the typhoons have left the country, Tambalo will not be able to plant
because most irrigation facilities have been damaged. Besides, he said, the
rains might just damage his harvest, which makes him hesitant to spend for
another cropping season — assuming he even has money to spare.
Philippine agriculture officials said the agriculture sector suffered the most
from the two cyclones. They placed the total damage to agriculture and
fisheries wrought by the two typhoons at 18.5 billion pesos (397.65 million
U.S dollars). The amount covers lost crops, fish and livestock, the damaged
irrigation facilities and 200,000 hectares of submerged land.
The impact of the two typhoons on Luzon was so huge that it forced
Philippine agriculture secretary Arthur Yap to downscale the country’s farm
growth rate to between 0.5 and 1.5 percent from the previous target of three
percent. Luzon accounts for roughly 50 percent of the country's total farm
output.
The worse part is that hunger and poverty now persist in what is supposed to
be the country's food basket. The once abundant farmlands — now heavily
damaged — may no longer be rehabilitated, depriving farmers of their main
source of food and livelihood. In an economic forum held last week, Yap said
that the two typhoons left more than 50,000 farmer families in Luzon "in a
state of financial ruin, hunger and severe poverty."
Unless the government will provide loans and subsidies, it will be difficult for
these farmers to recover from this devastation, said Rolando Dy, executive
director of the Center for Food and Agribusiness at the University of Asia and
the Pacific (UA&P).
"These farmers lost everything, " he said. Aside from the fact that their land
and irrigation system were destroyed, he added, they might also be deep in
debt, having borrowed money for planting crops. With their crops destroyed,
they will be hard put to repay their debts.
And while several NGOs, government agencies and international
organisations have been actively providing much needed help to these
farmers, not all of them were benefiting from their donations, at least during
the first few days after the typhoon.
Santos Mero, deputy secretary-general of the Cordillera People's Alliance
(CPA), a federation of indigenous people’s organizations in northern Luzon,
said they could not send relief goods to other hard-hit Cordillera provinces
like Ifugao, Apayao and the Mountain Province, as the main road connecting
Baguio City were rendered unpassable by the slides brought about typhoon.
Mero said that over 2,000 farmer families in these areas are in dire need of
relief goods, which is why CPA is also helping the workers to clear the roads
so that they can send them basic supplies such as rice, cooking oil, soap and
clothes.
But Mero said that food donations are just palliative measures. What is more
important is to help these farmers get back on their feet and reclaim their
livelihood.
"The next step is rehabilitation. We'll be asking our member organisations
and the government to provide seeds and other farm inputs so that these
farmers can start over," he said.
Mero, along with and other farmers, may just get their wish. In a speech
delivered in an agricultural forum held last week, Philippine President Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo said that she had already directed Yap to distribute seeds
to farmers within this month. She added Yap would prioritise seed
distribution to areas that had not been severely affected by flooding to
ensure that they can be planted immediately.
UA&P’s Dy welcomed the presidential directive, but noted that the
government assistance must come in as soon as possible so that the farmers
can plant and at least reclaim their capital.
In the meantime, the likes of Perez and Mero will continue cooking porridge
and boiled mung beans– to temporarily stave off hunger, giving the evacuees
strength for another day.
(END/2009)
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