SPECIAL REPORT
Aggressive GMO Promotion is Making
Ifugao Corn Farmers Poorer
Conclusion
If there’s anybody to
blame for making farm life in the Ifugao town of Alfonso Lista more and
more miserable today, it should be the Arroyo government for its
aggressive promotion of GMO in corn production in tandem with the TNC
giant Monsanto and the Ayalas, among other corporations.
BY FERNANDO BAGYAN AND
LULU GIMENEZ
Northern Dispatch
Posted by Bulatlat
BAGUIO CITY - The
municipality of Alfonso Lista,
known until recently as Potia, in Ifugao, hosts relatively young
settlements founded within the last eight decades.
The first settlers on
this remote upland town in the Cordillera region, northern Philippines
were Ilocanos who were plucked by American colonial authorities in the
1920s to start an agricultural colony. The colony was to replace
indigenous shifting cultivation with sedentary farming. Somewhat
successful, the Ilocano farmers’ colony 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 a fertile land that
could yield more than the aged wet-rice terraces and over-tilled swidden
sites of their cold villages in the interior Cordillera.
Today, nearly 65
percent of the town’s land is devoted to agriculture. Roughly, half the
agricultural land is used for crop production; the other half for pasture.
Rice used to be the main produce. Now, corn occupies at least 63 percent
of croplands. The only crops that are still grown in the traditional way
are bananas.
The National
Statistics Office (NSO) branch in Ifugao reports that the total population
of Alfonso Lista as of 2004 was 24,151 individuals or 4,650 households.
Almost all are peasant households who own the land they till under
homestead patents received from government for settling in the area.
Modern corn breeds
spread to Alfonso Lista from Isabela, where agriculture authorities
promoted them through various campaigns. These included Maisan (Corn
Country) 77, the Ramos government’s Medium Term Agricultural Development
Program, the Estrada government’s Agrikulturang Makamasa (Agriculture for
the Masses), and most recently, Macapagal-Arroyo’s Ginintuang Masaganang
Ani (Golden Harvest of Plenty).
The breeds that first
gained entry were the public varieties developed by the University of the
Philippines Institute of Plant Breeding. Soon these were replaced by
corporate-developed varieties – specifically those of San Miguel
Corporation, Corn World, Pioneer Hy-Brid, East-West, Cargill, Monsanto,
and Syngenta. With the seeds came the chemicals purposely designed for
them.
From 1997 to 2000,
monocrop production of corn expanded by 253 percent, and production volume
rose by more than 1,000 percent. (See Table )
Analyzing the terrain
The use of high-input
varieties in Alfonso Lista has not significantly altered the traditional,
peasant pattern of land tenure in the area: almost all households here
still own most of the land they till. Under the Comprehensive Agrarian
Reform Law, the old homestead patents were merely subdivided, with each
lot covering at least 24 hectares.
Most landholdings
planted to corn range from one-half to three hectares. Some households
with less than a hectare rent additional land from those with larger
holdings.
In general,
implements used by corn farmers still include the simple plow, harrow, and
carabao, and traditional handheld tools. But some modern mechanical
equipment have been introduced, like small tractors and row planters,
backpacked sprayers, threshers and shellers.
Not owning any
vehicle at all, most households hire truckers, paying them at a rate of P1
($0.02, based on an exchange rate of P55.71 per U.S. dollar) for every
kilo of corn transported. The dealers to whom the corn is to be delivered
own some of the trucks.
Use of high-input varieties like Bt
corn
All corn-producing
peasants in Alfonso Lista grow high-input varieties because they find
these more productive and marketable. Some are GMOs, but the majority are
simple hybrids.
The peasants of
Alfonso Lista were introduced to genetically-engineered varieties of corn
by agricultural input suppliers in Isabela who entered into dealership
contracts with the corporations that developed these, the promotions
personnel of those corporations and the agricultural officers of
government.
Bt corn was brought
to Isabela by Monsanto. This was during the field trials the company
conducted in the year 2000. In 2003, Monsanto’s Dekalb Yieldgard (DK 818
YG) reached Alfonso Lista.
Two years later,
however, Bt corn has yet to become the seed of choice in the area. Farm
operators choose it only when they are late in starting their crop, and
the crop is thus more vulnerable to weather problems and pests.
Many peasants of
Alfonso Lista avoid Bt corn because they have experienced severe itching
when handling the plants in the course of crop care and during threshing;
also when handling the corn grain during shelling and drying. In addition,
they have heard reports from fellow corn producers that there have been
cases in the neighboring municipality of
Lamut
of carabaos that died after eating the vegetative parts of the corn, and
of cattle’s hooves being cut when trampling corn stubbles in newly
harvested fields.
Moreover, the seeds
of DK 818 YG cost about twice as much as other corn seeds (P4,650 or
$83.47 vs. P2,300-P2,800 or $41.28-$50.26 per 18-kilogram sack). The
herbicides required in the care of the crop are also more expensive
(P1,350 vs P250 to P900 per 1-liter bottle). The Bacillus thuringensis in
Bt corn transfers to any weeds surrounding the corn plots and makes these
weeds just as sturdy as the corn crop. It is therefore necessary to use a
very powerful herbicide that is specifically formulated to kill “Bt
weeds.”
The peasants of
Alfonso Lista are still unaware of reports that the Bacillus thuringensis
protein in Bt corn can be transferred to other plants, including any food
crops that they grow near their corn fields for their own households’
consumption. Neither are they aware of the findings that the antibiotic
markers which allowed the Bacillus thuringensis protein to get spliced
into corn DNA can significantly reduce the ability of both people and
livestock who consume Bt corn grain to make use of antibiotics like
Streptomycin. It is possible that if they were to be made aware of the
aforesaid findings, the peasants of Alfonso Lista will become even less
receptive to Bt corn than they are at present, notwithstanding the
aggressive promotion of this GMO by their agricultural input suppliers,
Monsanto, and government.
Most of the corn
farmers of Alfonso Lista lack money to spend on the inputs they need and
thus have to avail of credit. However, there are no credit institutions
within the municipality. Both government and private agencies have tried
to establish cooperatives here but those that they started went bankrupt
due to mismanagement.
Some of the peasants
get credit from the Santiago, Isabela branch of Quedancor, the Quedan and
Rural Credit Guarantee Corporation that used to be attached to the DA but
has been re-organized by Macapagal-Arroyo and placed directly under her
office. Its main function is to provide credit for endeavors that are in
line with the President’s agricultural modernization priorities.
Most peasants prefer
to enter into a credit arrangement with one of Santiago’s agricultural
input dealers. Under the deal, the creditor will provide all the inputs at
an interest of 30 percent per cropping, and the debtor is obliged to sell
his or her crop to the creditor even if other dealers offer higher
prices. No collateral is needed.
Reneging on the terms
of the loan will have dire consequences, however. The debtor will be
blacklisted by the creditor and lose access to future loans if the debtor
is unable inability to deliver his or her harvest and pay the loan. The
loan will then have to be paid at the next harvest - double the interest.
Meantime, the debtor will have to take out another loan to produce the
next crop that he or she must deliver.
The
government’s responsibility
Government has played
a key role in promoting modern corn breeds among the peasants of Alfonso
Lista.
The Municipal
Agricultural Office (MAO) of Alfonso Lista has conducted field trials and
technology demonstrations using different corn seeds provided free by the
agricultural input producing firms Monsanto (through its Philippine
research partner, Ayala), Syngenta, Pioneer, Corn World, and BioSeed, plus
Asian Hybrid. In addition, the MAO has been selling these firms’ corn
seeds to first-time users among Alfonso Lista’s peasants at a subsidy, for
only half the prevailing market price.
The experiences of
corn-producing peasants in Alfonso Lista underscore the negative effects
of the Philippine government’s promotion of the market-oriented production
of modern plant breeds through its agricultural modernization programs.
No such modernization
is taking place, however. The programs just promote the intensive use of
inputs which can only be acquired after spending so much. To access the
inputs, the peasants thus need access to credit. Nowadays, the Philippine
government, through Quedancor, offers such credit, but on conditions that
include the surrender of collateral in the form of landed property – a
condition that peasants coming from indigenous Cordillera cultures find
hard to live with.
Worse, in a market
flooded with cheap imports, the prices of the peasants’ produce have
become inelastic. Most likely, they will earn only enough for their
households’ subsistence. Most likely, they will have to again borrow
money or inputs for their next harvest.
Not only is debt
repeatedly incurred; the debt continually increases as the peasants get
caught in a pattern of increasing loan-dependent input utilization.
It may not have
happened yet in Alfonso Lista, but in other parts of the Cordillera ,
peasants have also become dependent on credit for access to the most basic
subsistence goods. This is particularly true along the Vegetable Belt that
extends from La Trinidad in Benguet northward to Bauko in the Mountain
Province and eastward to Tinoc in Ifugao.
Clearly, the
situation in the Cordillera shows the risks that peasants face when they
give up producing food for their own consumption and abandon the
diversified cropping system traditional to peasant agriculture. With
research from APIT TAKO Ifugao Organizing Committee / Nordis / Bulatlat
Table 1.
Monocrop production of corn |
Year |
Crop Area
(hectares) |
Percentage
of Total Agricultural Land Area |
Volume of
Production (metric tons) |
TotalValue
at Current Prices (pesos) |
|
6,497 |
24% |
10,647 |
37,000,000 - 80,000,000 |
2000 |
16,467 |
63% |
131,736 |
461,076,000 - 988,020,000 |
Source: Alfonso Lista Municipal
Agriculture Office |
Gov’t Promotes ‘Suicide Seeds,’ Transgenics in Cordillera
First of two parts
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