This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 37, October 23-29, 2005
SPECIAL REPORT
Gov’t Promotes ‘Suicide Seeds,’ Transgenics
in Cordillera
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 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). 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
© 2005 Bulatlat
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Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.
First of two parts
Northern Dispatch
Posted by BulatlatTerminators and transgenics
Conclusion