(Continued from yesterday)
FIRST things first, let me backtrack a little bit. In my studies about renewable energy production, I came across the term “municipal governance”, alluding to the fact that local development could, and should be managed in the municipal context.
That “discovery” led me to remember what I have been writing about for so long now, that the term “municipal” should be used here in this country to refer to both the towns and the cities. That way, we could use the term “municipal governance” as a generic term that would refer to all local government units (LGUs) that are below the provincial level.
That way also, we could standardize the nomenclature of the Municipal Development Councils (MDCs) to refer to both the towns and the cities. This is important to accept in the context of this discussion, because the gathering and consolidation should be done first at the municipal level.
I am making it a point to talk about data management, because it is a business process that is directly related to the marketing of all agricultural production, and not just rice production. Of course it could be said that our farmers have many problems that are actually on top of each other, but if you ask me, I would say that the best place to start is the rationalization of farm gate prices.
The farm gate is the point where the oppression of our farmers could easily be detected, recorded and remedied. Of course, data management alone by itself is not the only solution. We all know that many if not most of our farmers could no longer get the best price for their produce, because the middlemen are the ones who dictate the prices, given the fact that the farmers are heavily indebted to the middlemen, in other words, the production of the farmers are already considered “pre-sold” or “pre-negotiated” at very low prices.
It goes without saying that the way to liberate our farmers from the stranglehold of the middlemen is to give them access to affordable capital, the kind of financing that is not oppressive nor is usurious. Sad to say, the anti-usury laws in this country have been abolished, paving the way for loan sharks and usurers to proliferate.
There is still hope however, as more microfinance organizations, credit cooperatives and rural banks are getting into the picture. In closing, we could say that financing and marketing are two areas where interventions could be quickly made to help our farmers.
Of course, that is just to start helping them, because they also need help with technologies, specifically information and communications technologies (ICT), renewable energy technologies and food processing technologies.
In a recent case study, an ICT provider was able to prove that farmers in a municipality were able to increase their production by simply using text messaging. If you are wondering how that happened, I will tell you that they increased their revenues when they were able to sell at higher prices, after getting the right price information via text messaging.
Using their profits that they derived from higher revenues, they were able to invest more in production, hence their harvest also increased. This is the kind of positive chain reaction that should happen among our farmers. Not the negative chain reaction that now results into a chain of oppression that keeps our farmers poor.
Going back to proper labeling, if only we will know what to buy, we can make our farmers richer, and as they become rich, we will also become rich as a country./PN