Before the break of dawn, a farmer huddles in his field, hands dust-dry, with aching back from a lifetime of labor. He gathers a basket of tomatoes, which he sells cheaply to middlemen who squander later in city bazaars for triple, even quadruple, the amount. The farmer is still poor, the middleman rich, and the consumer pays too much for something that ought to be cheaper. This vicious cycle prevails—a system failure, a wrong that paralyzes the very people who feed the country.
As a nation conceptualized to be agricultural, our country ought to be a land of prosperity for its farmers. Instead, they are caught in an economic straitjacket where middlemen determine the price for their hard-worked crop. Without direct contact with consumers, no place to send their produce, and no help from the government with a strength adequate to break this chain, farmers have to accept whatever price is offered to them. The irony is so overwhelming that most hardworking and productive people who are making the most fundamental commodities are poor, while intermediary individuals are rich and living in comfort.
The cause of the malady is a deficiency of equitable and effective farm-to-market arrangement. Government intervention has either been absent or limited to enable the traders and wholesalers to fix prices. Unless there is government protection or support mechanisms, the market forces wouldn’t be favorable to the farmers. That kilo of rice that a farmer gets paid P20 for will make its way to the supermarket for P50. That bag of onions that departs from a farmer’s barn at P800 will be sold in Metro Manila at P4,000. Where does all that additional money come from? Not to the planter who planted it, not to the consumer who purchases it, but to the pocket of some middleman who planted no seed and watered none.
You can say that middlemen are offering a service—yes, they transport, ship, and get produce into markets. But for what? Their unregulated nature allows them to take both extremes for themselves. Without rival systems such as farmer cooperatives or farm-to-market programs directly competing, the gap between farmgate and retail prices will just keep growing. In other countries, there are farmers’ unions or subsidized programs by governments to ensure reasonable remuneration for the farmers. Why not the Philippines?
To add insult to injury, most of them are still deeply in debt. They borrow money to purchase seeds, fertilizers, and machinery in hopes of a good harvest that will enable them to settle their dues. But when middlemen purchase from them at cut-price rates, they hardly get enough to cover their expenses. The rest of the nation is asking why food prices are rising. That is the irony of our agricultural economy—farmers are receiving less, while consumers are paying more. The disparity is stark, but it recurs year after year.
There are efforts by government schemes to rectify this, but they are half-hearted, bureaucratic, and short-lived. There are loan programs, but they are high-interest. Market access programs are initiated but collapse due to corruption and mismanagement. If politicians do not have the will to benefit the farmers, then they will never improve and the consumers will never stop suffering. The government is not simply required to give band-aid answers—it has to destroy exploitative systems that have placed farmers into bondage economically for decades.
There is no lack of solutions. Strengthening farmers’ cooperatives, creating direct consumer markets, subsidizing transport from farms, and fixing prices on middlemen are all conceivable options. But will they ever be implemented in a country where farm policies are determined by those who gain from it but not by those who labor in the fields? Until and unless the government decides to take the interests of farmers ahead of money-mongering traders, this cycle of doom shall never end.
Those whose hands feed the nation’s table should never be the same hands excluded. If the government is committed to food security and economic justice, it needs to intervene—not with hollow words but with real reform that puts the farmer, not shortchanged again. Because if this continues, one day we wake up to an empty plate, and too late to realize that we have starved the very farmers who placed food on our plates.
