A farmer bends in his rice field under the scorching sun, smoothing his fingers over golden seeds he knows will not be enough. At harvest season, a middleman will come and negotiate him down to a price so low it will not even cover the seed and fertilizer. He’ll sigh, take the loss, and do it again next year—if he can afford to. This is the Filipino cycle of despair in agriculture, where sweat and toil end in heartbreak, not wealth.
The middlemen are vultures who come just in time to swoop in and grab what they can, leaving the farmers with leftovers. They set prices, knowing that farmers cannot bargain. If a sack of palay should be sold for twenty pesos per kilo, they will give ten. Take it or leave it. And leaving alone is not because the farmers themselves are already living in debt borrowed from loan sharks, fertilizer company suppliers, and machine rentals. These men toil under the blistering heat only to lose their sweat from the fruits of their labor as they fall into the hands of traders who take advantage of their misery.
And more so for people living in areas infested by NPA members. Armed men come knocking on doors, not to purchase crops, but to extort a “revolutionary tax” at gunpoint. It does not matter that the farmer is already making pennies. He has to pay, or else. Those who attempt to refuse may never be heard of again. Others escape to the city to evade extortion, leaving their land, their inheritance, and their sole source of livelihood. If the government can’t protect them, who can? Farming is difficult enough, but farming in fear is impossible.
And then there are the typhoons—ferocious, relentless, and merciless. Farmers don’t sow crops; they bet on the sky. When rains pour more violently than they should and the winds blow more strongly than they should, fields are cut to zero in a night’s sweep. A year’s work wiped out in hours. No insurance, no subsidies, no opportunity to recover. Farmers who lose each crop season just refrain from planting altogether. Why suffer again and again if nature herself appears to have a mind to defraud them?
And so, with all these calamities, it is not surprising that Filipino farmers have been minimized to subsistence-level agriculture. They do plant because they need to eat and not sell in markets. It’s not laziness, nor is it a lack of ambition—it’s sheer survival. The economy dictates mass production, but how can one produce at a large scale when the system itself guarantees failure? No one chooses to be poor; poverty is set up as a trap for them, and every road forward leads to another dead end.
Some critics will counter with, “Then why not change crops? Why not innovate? “ These are the sentiments of one who has never once mastered a plow. Farming is not business; it’s a way of life, subject to the caprices of weather, custom, and custom of long habitude. An irrigator rice farmer can’t be a cacao grower overnight. Experiment funds are lacking, quality training is out of reach, and no government scheme trickles down to reach those who are truly in need.
The large farm owners can diversify—but small farmers cannot. And thus, the exodus continues. Farmers abandon farms to migrate to the cities and labor on Manila’s construction sites, in Cavite factories, for whatever better-paying jobs than in the soil they used to till. The provinces, or the food pillar of the country, are forsaken. And when the farmers are away, then who will feed us? Who will bend their backs in the sun so rice keeps our plates full? The country is losing answers, and it is running out of farmers.
The answer is not complex. Farmers require honest prices, genuine government assistance, safety from insurgent groups, and protection from weather calamities. They require respect—not sympathy. As long as the system continues to treat them like throwaway trash, as long as middlemen continue to take them for a ride, and as long as farming becomes an unprofitable career once more, our fields will continue to vacate. And someday, we shall wake up to a nation that no longer knows how to feed itself.
