Food on every table

The surveys showed that she was perilously close in public approval ratings with then Vice-President Joseph Estrada, for whose presidential bid I worked. Political realities however, translated into logistics and network, got Senator Arroyo to lower her sights and become Speaker Joe de Venecia’s running-mate. She won. He lost.

A political tour de force with conspiracies dripping all over the place brought about President Estrada’s ouster from Malacañang and the ascent of the oh-so-lucky Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. It will be six years to the day by Sunday next since GMA became president of the land.

Yet sadly, there is little if any food on most every Filipino table. Subsistence means rice and instant noodles, the menu quotidienne of millions of the Filipino masa. Noodles are made of flour, carbo-loading flavored with monosodium glutamate. Rice is carbo-loading once more, but then, what choice have the poor ? Mabigat sa tiyan, may lasa kahit unti-unting nalalason. We import flour, as our climate will not allow wheat to thrive. Sadly, we import our rice as well.

We do not have the great rivers like the Mekong or the Irrawady to supply endless irrigation to seamless tracts of land, as in Vietnam or Thailand or Burma. We have some – the Cagayan, the Agusan, the Rio Grande, helping to irrigate separated tracts of land clustered around a scattering of islands. Yet we eat the same staple as China or Japan, Indonesia or Indo-China. But we are not self-sufficient in the staple.

What we do not have by way of boundless land or boundless water, we should be compensating through the ingenuity of our scientists. We have in fact trained, through the University of the Philippines in Los Baños as well as the internationally-funded IRRI, both in my native province of Laguna, countless agriculturists and technicians on the science of rice production since two generations back. Their native countries now export rice by the millions and millions of tons, surplus over their people’s needs. We now import rice from them, as well as flour to create noodles with, from the US, or Canada, and that my friends, is what we call "food on every table". Pagkain sa bawa’t hapag ng tahanang Pilipino, imported pa!

But there is hope, and that is the good news. Filipino agro-scientists and bio-technologists are showing the way, through persistent research and the patriotism of their convictions that someday, at least within their lifetimes, they shall have contributed to that oft-propagandized but elusive dream of food on every table.

A company called Summa Biotechnologies, organized in 1993 to research for ways and means of supplying a sister company in agri-business with organic fertilizers and environment-friendly fishpond food supplements, made recent breakthroughs in aquaculture technologies and nitrogen-fixing inoculants adaptable to rice, corn and vegetables. Last year, Summa went into high gear and decided to introduce some of their developed products in the area where their laboratory and production chain are located – the Caraga Region, one of the country’s most depressed. And their first customer was the City of Butuan, specifically Mayor Democrito "Boy Daku" Plaza, who had in his territory some 4,000 hectares of irrigated ricelands cultivated by marginal farmers who plowed an average of 1.5 hectares or so each.

First the mayor tested in a pilot area, Nitro-Fix, a bio-organic fertilizer that contained nitrogen-fixing bacteria which attracts the nitrogen in the atmosphere and converts it into a form that substitutes for 50% of the chemical fertilizers needed as inputs by rice and corn. The results were phenomenal. Fertilizer cost per hectare was reduced by half, and average yields grew by 20 percent. The incremental revenue of each Butuan farmer could go up to some 50,000 pesos per year.

Realizing the immense benefits to his agricultural community, Mayor Plaza convened some 2,000 farmers last December, the start of the planting season, at the Northern Mindanao Institute of Science and Technology, in what he billed as the first-ever Butuan Rice Congress. With the help of the city’s agricultural extension workers, farmers were taught on the protocol of using the nitrogen-fixing organic fertilizer, and thereafter, Plaza distributed packets of the product to the farmers. Critical to the use of organic biotechnology is the strict compliance with the methodology, and Boy Daku was not about to take any chances.

Plaza hopes to increase the rice yield of his city by some 4,000 metric tons, equivalent to 80,000 cavans of palay with a market value of some 40 million pesos, at very little cost to the city’s coffers. Plaza explained in homespun logic, paraphrasing Confucius, that instead of giving his people rice, he has taught them to harvest more rice. Thanks to the wonders of biotechnology, and thanks to the nameless Filipino scientists whose breakthrough we recognize here with endless praise.

Significantly, the officer-in-charge of the Department of Agriculture in Caraga Region, Ricardo Regis, has similarly pilot-tested Nitro-Fix in Agusan del Sur, Agusan del Norte and Surigao del Sur. And the results are very positive. A breakthrough has been established in Butuan City and in Caraga, through the initiative of both the local government and the regional director of the DA. Rice farmers from as far as Maranding and Lala in Lanao del Norte have taken notice, and are soon adopting the wonders of biotechnology in their farms.

It also makes for good politics. Once the farmers see greener and sturdier rice stalks pregnant with produce come April of this year, who do you think they will remember on May 14, as they go to the polls in between drying their bumper crop?

Now if only the national government agencies will take notice of what is happening to rice production in Butuan City and Caraga, then perhaps GMA’s promise of "food on very table" could yet be fulfilled in her presidential lifetime, minus the onus of importing grain from Vietnam, or Indonesia, or Thailand, or even India.

Who was it who once cried, "The Filipino can"? He makes money importing wheat which his company turns into flour and another company turns into instant noodles, and importing meat and extenders which his other company turns into corned beef and hotdogs. And yet, truly, the Filipino can.