I had a recent stimulating interaction with the new director of the Food and Fertilizer Technology Center in Taiwan, Dr. Kuo-Ching Lin, who was a former Deputy Minister of Agriculture and a council member of the National Sustainable Development Council.
We discussed issues of food security both in Taiwan and the Philippines, together with his deputy, Akio Takenaka and the FFTC information officer, Ronald Mangubat, who comes from Batangas City and has been with FFTC in Taipei for almost a decade.
While Taiwan’s agricultural productivity is miles and miles improved compared to ours, there is cause for worry, according to Dr. Lin.
“We have an ageing farmer species,” he sadly observed. The average farmer’s age is past 60 in Taiwan.
He himself is the son of a farmer, but none of his siblings went into actual farming. They all pursued different professions. I told him that we used to own a 142 hectare farm in Davao City, part of it planted to pomelos, but our parents decided to offer it to the Department of Agrarian Reform on voluntary sale because none of us siblings were interested in managing a farm. Up to now, we have inherited land from my maternal grandmother in Laguna and Quezon from which we barely earn enough to pay for the real estate taxes, or ameliar.
And while the average age of Filipino farmers is 56, younger than their Taiwanese and Japanese counterparts, our rural folk also die younger than theirs.
If you look at the student population of our premier agricultural school, you will note that there are less and less of our youth interested in agriculture, or forestry, or agricultural economics courses. Farming is simply no longer “sexy.”
The phenomenon is a function of two realities in the Philippine situation: Farming is not lucrative enough; in fact in most cases, it is just for subsistence. The other reality being that farming parents want their children to become “titulado,” that is, they would work their butts off to get their children to finish a college course, so that they could find better employment and compensation. Unfortunately these days, better compensation comes in the form of overseas employment, which while currently the economy’s lifeblood, would eventually result in brain and brawn drain.
In Taiwan and Japan, it is not low farm incomes. Their farmers earn more than enough, unlike their Filipino counterpart. The youth just prefer to migrate to the cities from the farm, where life is well…easier. And then ensconced in good paying jobs, they get to love the good life, travel, that they prefer not to marry and reproduce offspring.
When farms are no longer tilled, what happens to food security? Who will plant or raise the food that we need to eat? This is a real problem that stares our next generation in the face. For the Philippines, with farm productivity either stagnant or declining, the spectre is upon us already.
Days after, I had a lovely dinner with the CEO of one of the biggest Taiwanese investors in the Philippines, prepared by his gracious wife. Although they are big on electronics, their company has recently invested heavily on biotechnology. The vegetables in the salad we had were “manufactured,” not cultivated. Manufactured because they were products of artificial sunlight from LED lamps, and watered through hydroponics inside a “factory,” not even a greenhouse. The vegetables were very crispy, and flavored with salt and spices, courtesy of the magic of hydroponics.
Unbelievable!
Here in the Philippines, we cannot even irrigate our rice paddies and corn fields enough. Our Christmas goodies are not homegrown fruits. They are imported apples, oranges and grapes. What a country!
But if the present situation is bad enough, think of how critical the future of food security is. With our population still growing by leaps and bounds, not because our libido is uncontrolled compared to that of the Japanese or the Taiwanese, but because our numerous church and its bishops keep preventing the State from preventing unwanted and un-programmed pregnancies, food security is such a huge problem and will soon engulf us in nightmarish proportions.
The only consolation, if it is one, is that soon the Japanese and the Taiwanese will need young Filipino muscles to work on their farms. But here we compete with Indonesians whose population is more than double ours.
The obvious solution to food insecurity is to produce more food, to coax greater productivity from our land. This is easier said than done. It will take resources which are scarce in our yet developing economy. It will require technology which means we have to partner with foreign countries which have developed far advanced agricultural technologies, even as we fund and undertake our own research. It will require rational agricultural policies (and we are glad to note the DA under Secretary Manny Piñol is emphasizing a color-coded program that matches soil conditions with the kind of crops that should be planted), and above all, political will, to ensure, as Taiwan and Thailand and even Malaysia are doing, that their agricultural economy is given primacy.
There are a thousand and one things that must be attended to, and quickly, to ensure food security for the present and future generations. Thank God and human ingenuity that agricultural technology can now be shared by countries.
Even then, there is a need to convince our young people that farming is “sexy” enough, but first we ought to make it financially rewarding.
Countries like Japan and Taiwan may have ageing populations brought about by decades of zero population growth (where the number of babies born are as much if not less than the number of deaths), but they are way up there in technology that they will survive a lack of farming brawn.
But countries like the Philippines have to grapple with little land, little water, and so many mouths to feed. With our youth turning their backs on agriculture, the future of food production and food security looks bleak.