Home | To bottom

Corn farming in Alfonso Lista, Ifugao

Implications of promoting market-oriented production
Part 1 of 3

By FERNANDO BAGYAN and LULU GIMENEZ

Agricultural Modernization Programs in the Cordillera

The Cordillera’s harsh mountain environment poses many limitations on agriculture.

Nearly 61% of the region is sloped in excess of 50%. This makes the Cordillera severely erosive, its topsoil layer fairly thin.

The Cordillera does descend to gently rolling foothills interrupted by a few vast expanses of plateau. But its mountain ranges proper are very ruggedly ridged. And even where the indigenous peasantry have succeeded in taming the ridges by means of terracing, they have not been able to create any wide fields.

Altitudes climb to as high as 2,900 meters. Temperatures drop to as low as 4o celsius. Winds can race to a velocity of 240 kilometers per hour. As much as 1.5 meters of rain may fall on a single day. These factors make crop, livestock, and fish production difficult and even risky.

Owing to these factors, population growth has easily outpaced the expansion of traditional subsistence agriculture. This is particularly true in regard to wet-rice production, which is framed by customs that date to as far back as the 12th century. Thus, recent generations of the indigenous peasantry have tended to become increasingly hospitable to modern introductions that promise cash earnings with which households can buy additional supplies of rice and pay for other basic necessities.

Since the 1970s, Philippine agriculture authorities have been aggressively introducing new crop breeds to Cordillera communities. From the 1970s to the 1990s, they did this as part of programs that they were implementing in partnership with foreign governments or multilateral institutions. These included the Marcos government’s counterpart in the worldwide Green Revolution program, which was financed by credit from the World Bank; the RP-German Seed Potato and Fruit Tree Projects; the Highland Agricultural Development Program and the Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resource Management Project, which were financed by credit from the Asian Development Bank; the Central Cordillera Agricultural Programme and the Caraballo and Southern Cordillera Agricultural Development Programme, which were funded by the European Union. But since Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, a neo-liberal economist, assumed the Presidency in 2001, the Department of Agriculture has shifted to partnership with the private sector, introducing new types of seeds in conjunction with the market development efforts of a number of transnational corporations.

In the early years, agriculture authorities simply introduced rice, vegetable, and fruit varieties of the Green Revolution type – i.e., the type that would deliver higher yields with higher levels of chemical fertilizer and pesticide utilization. More recently, the DA introduced hybrids that would deliver even higher yields, but only on F1 or first-generation planting. Now the DA is also introducing GMOs, or genetically modified organisms.

Two types of GMOs are being promoted. The first are the terminators, which deliver yields as high as those of the hybrids, but only on first-generation planting, and thus, together with the hybrids, are commonly known as “suicide seeds”. The second are the transgenics, which are highly productive, highly resilient, and highly pest-resistant, but nonetheless require heavy utilization of chemicals, this time to regulate gene activity or control its effects.

The cultivation of the old Green Revolution breeds, the new suicide seeds, and the transgenics requires the expenditure of substantial amounts of cash on the seeds themselves and on the agrochemicals needed to grow them. But peasants in the Cordillera, like most peasants everywhere, are often cash-strapped. To acquire inputs, many must enter into credit financing or supplying arrangements with the same merchants who have offered to deal in their produce or who have already been doing so.

In the Cordillera, as in the rest of the Philippines, the terms of rural credit are mostly usurious – with interest rates that range from 10% to 20% per month, and even reach up to 100% per cropping season. And the credit financing or supplying contracts offered to peasants are mostly lopsided in favor of the merchants. The usual result is the enmeshing of the peasant household in a situation of chronic indebtedness. Despite awareness of this, an increasing number of Cordillera peasants have been drawn into high-input cash-crop production simply because their traditional engagement in low-input production is no longer enough to meet even their basic subsistence needs.

Yet cash-crop or market-oriented production provides them with hardly any subsistence security. Prices rise and fall not only because of fluctuations in supply and demand, but also because of distorting manipulations of the market by deeply entrenched merchant cartels and by the transnational Nestlé, which enjoys a veritable monopsony on Philippine coffee, buying as it does 95% of the entire country’s production.

In 2001 and 2002, the Philippine domestic market for many Cordillera product lines crashed repeatedly as a result of the liberalized importation of agricultural goods. By 2003, so many Cordillera peasants had been forced out of the vegetable trade that regional production of major vegetable crops for the market fell by an average of nearly 49% (according to data from the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics branch in the Cordillera Administrative Region). While some of the peasants who had been displaced from the market managed by reverting to low-input subsistence production, others could not and were forced out of agriculture altogether, because they either had lost access to the necessary seed stocks or were tilling land that had been too badly degraded by agrochemicals to support low-input farming.

The result has been the aggravation of food insufficiency, already recorded in 31.1% of Cordillera households in the year 2000 (during the last National Statistics Office Census of Population and Housing).

Alfonso Lista

The municipality of Alfonso Lista, known until recently as Potia, in Ifugao, hosts fairly young settlements founded within the last eight decades. The first settlers were Ilocano brought here by American authorities in the 1920s to start an agricultural colony that could serve to demonstrate the advantages of sedentary farming to the indigenous shifting cultivators in the vicinity. Successful, they eventually attracted Gaddang and Ibanag from the Cagayan valley to the east, and Kalinga from the Cordillera foothills to the north. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Bontok, Kankanaey, and Ibaloy from the Mountain Province and Benguet, and Ifugao from the municipalities of Mayoyao, Banaue, Lagawe, and Kiangan, settled here as well, drawn by reports of a warm place with young land that could be worked to yield more than did the aged wet-rice terraces and over-tilled swidden sites of their cold villages in the interior Cordillera.

Today, nearly 65% of the municipality’s land area is devoted to agriculture. Roughly, half the agricultural land is used for crop production; the other half is designated as pasture. Rice used to be the main produce. Now, corn occupies at least 63% of croplands.

According to the NSO branch in Ifugao, the total population of Alfonso Lista as of 2004 was 24,151 individuals distributed in 4,650 households. Almost all are peasant households who own the land they cultivate by virtue of the homestead patents they or their predecessors received from government upon settling in the area.

Agriculture in the Area Prior to the Introduction of Modern Plant Breeds

Before their introduction to the market-oriented production of modern plant breeds, the peasants of the area engaged mainly in traditional subsistence agriculture. They planted traditional varieties of rice, corn, root crops, legumes, and vegetables, the first seeds of which they had brought with them when they settled in the area. They sold only a small portion of the crops they grew from these seeds. For most of their cash needs, they relied on tobacco, which they sold in neighboring towns of Isabela. Small-scale livestock production, hunting, and river fishing provided their supply of protein.

They collected their seeds at harvest, carefully selecting off-types as planting material for the next cropping season. They exchanged their seeds with one another. Thus were they able to continually develop their planting materials and propagate different crop varieties throughout the municipality.

Agriculture mostly consisted of rain fed and swidden cultivation. Wet-rice production was limited to relatively flat areas.

Next week: The Green Revolution introduced modern plant breeds

Home | Back to top