SPECIAL REPORT
Gov’t Promotes
‘Suicide Seeds,’ Transgenics in Cordillera
First of two parts
For generations, many
farming villages in the Cordillera mountain region, northern Philippines
were self-sufficient in food. But Marcos’ “Green Revolution” and, in
recent years, trade liberalization have erased all that. Today, the
production of major vegetable crops has fallen in the process uprooting
tens of thousands of indigenous peasants.
BY FERNANDO BAGYAN AND
LULU GIMENEZ
Northern Dispatch
Posted by Bulatlat
BAGUIO CITY - For
generations, many farming villages in the Cordillera mountain region,
northern Philippines were self-sufficient in food. The introduction of
cash crop production particularly through Marcos’ “Green Revolution” and,
in recent years, trade liberalization has erased all that, however. Today,
the production of major vegetable crops has fallen in the process
uprooting tens of thousands of indigenous peasants.
Farming generally has
been a major problem in the Cordillera region given its harsh mountain
environment. Its topsoil layer is thin since nearly 61 percent of the
region is sloped. Although the peasants have succeeded in taming the
ridges through terracing, they have not been able to create any wide
fields.
Altitudes climb to as
high as 2,900 meters and temperatures drop to as low as 4o
celsius. Winds can race to a velocity of 240 kph. 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. Not surprisingly, population
growth has outpaced the traditional subsistence agriculture. This is
particularly true for wet-rice production, a practice that dates as early
as the 12th century.
Since the 1970s,
Philippine agriculture authorities have aggressively introduced new crop
breeds to Cordillera communities. These included the Marcos government’s
counterpart in the worldwide Green Revolution program which was financed
by the World Bank; the Philippine-German Seed Potato and Fruit Tree
Projects; the Highland Agricultural Development Program and the Cordillera
Highland Agricultural Resource Management Project, which were financed by
the Asian Development Bank; the Central Cordillera Agricultural Program
and the Caraballo and Southern Cordillera Agricultural Development Program
which were funded by the European Union.
President Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo went even further. Since assuming the presidency through
a second people power in 2001, the Department of Agriculture (DA) has
shifted to partnership with the private sector, introducing new types of
seeds alongside the market development efforts of transnational
corporations.
In the early years,
agriculture authorities introduced rice, vegetable, and fruit varieties of
the Green Revolution type (i.e., the type that is supposed to 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
department is also introducing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs).
Terminators and transgenics
In particular, 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, resilient, and pest-resistant, but require heavy
doses of chemicals, this time to regulate gene activity or control its
effects.
To cultivate the
old Green Revolution breeds, the new “suicide seeds,” and the transgenics
huge amounts of money are spent for the seeds as well as agrochemicals.
However, like their counterparts in other regions, peasants in the
Cordillera are always cash-strapped. To acquire farm inputs, many of them
enter into credit financing or supplying arrangements with the same
merchants trade their produce.
In the Cordillera,
the terms of rural credit are mostly usurious – with interest rates that
range from 10 percent to 20 percent every month, and even reach up to 100
percent for every cropping season. To top it all, the credit financing or
supplying contracts offered to peasants are mostly lopsided in favor of
the merchants further forcing the peasants to indebtedness. More and more
Cordillera peasants have been drawn into high-input cash-crop production
simply because their traditional low-input production is no longer enough
to meet even their basic subsistence.
Yet cash-crop or
market-oriented production gives them little 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
percent 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, many Cordillera peasants had been forced out of the
vegetable trade with regional production of major vegetable crops for the
market falling by an average of nearly 49 percent, based on data from the
Bureau of Agricultural Statistics branch in the Cordillera Administrative
Region (CAR). While some peasants who had been displaced from the market
made do 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 pegged at 31.1 percent of
Cordillera households, according to the 2000 Census of Population and
Housing. With research from APIT TAKO Ifugao Organizing Committee /
Nordis / Posted by Bulatlat
Aggressive GMO Promotion is Making Ifugao Corn Farmers Poorer
Conclusion
BACK TO
TOP ■
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION ■
COMMENT
© 2005 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications
Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided
its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.