MUÑOZ, NUEVA ECIJA-- Feliciano Gazpar, 50, a farmer in Barangay Bibiclat, Aliaga, Nueva Ecija owns a one-hectare rice land but because he has no money to buy enough commercial farm inputs, he cultivated only about a quarter of his plot this year.

“Gusto ko mang tamnan ng palay ang lupa namin wala akong magagawa, ala naman akong mailalagay na pataba at gamot. Malulubog lang lalo kami sa utang.” [I cannot plant rice to all of my land even if I wanted to. I can’t afford to buy fertilizers and pesticides. We will only be more indebted], Gazpar told GLNS in an interview.

High farm inputs have burdened rice farmers in Central Luzon, the country’s biggest rice-producing region, since the 1960s when the US-funded International Rice Research Instituted [IRRI] was established.

IRRI has drawn criticism from farmers and scientists worldwide for introducing high yielding rice varieties [HYV] that require expensive inputs produced by giant agrochemical corporations.

WORA 2007

Last April 3, Gazpar along with about 100 members of the Alyansa ng mga Magbubukid sa Gitnang Luzon [AMGL, Central Luzon Peasant Alliance] held a picket in front of the Philippine Rice Research Institute [PhilRice] office in Munoz, Nueva Ecija to protest the government and agrochemical firms’ “collusion” to propagate genetically-engineered [GE] rice and denounce the disappearance of traditional rice varieties.

PhilRice is IRRI’s research and marketing arm based in Central Luzon. The protest was part of a week-long activity by farmers in Asia dubbed as “Week of Rice Action 2007” [WORA 2007] to “protect rice culture and resist agrochemical transnational corporations.”

Gazpar said he had to borrow money to buy three bags of Urea fertilizer costing P950 each and a one-liter bottle of pesticide costing almost P1,000 for the 2,500 sq. m. parcel that he planted to rice. He planted vegetables in the rest of his farm.

After paying his debts at an interest rate of one cavan [50 kg. sack worth about P500] of palay [unhusked rice] per P1,000 borrowed and deducting other expenses, he estimates that he will be left with about a month’s supply of rice for food as his net income.

“Dagdagan ko man ang itatanim ko pareho din ang mangyayari. Wala ding matitira sa amin. Yan ang ginawa ng mga ahensyang iyan” [Even if I planted more, the same thing will happen. Nothing will be left for my family. That is what these agencies did to us]. Gazpar said.

Debunking government’s claim that HYVs has improved the lot of farmers, Joseph Canlas, AMGL chair explained that while it is true that the average palay yield per hectare has grown, the cost of fertilizer, pesticides and other farm inputs have risen to 30 to 40% of the total production cost per hectare.

Shrinking land

Gazpar is a recipient of a certificate of land ownership award [CLOA] under the government’s land reform program. But he has been unable to pay amortization fees and is in danger of losing his land.

He laments that the government originally valued his land at P9,000 but when it was recently subjected to re-evaluation he is now asked to pay some P100,000 in amortization payments—an amount that he cannot earn from farming given the high cost of production. The National Irrigation Administration also requires him to pay P1,700 yearly in irrigation fees.

Many farmers in his village have lost their farms to money lenders and big landowners or their CLOAs and emancipation patents have been either revoked or cancelled because of prohibitive production costs, he said. AMGL records show that farms in Central Luzon average in size from 1.5 ha. to only ½ ha. and continue to shrink.

“Due to unabated land use conversion and ejectment of farmers from the land they till the total hectarage planted to rice in the region has shrunk to only 449,941 has. from 678,532 has. in 1985. In the process, traditional rice varieties that do not need expensive farm inputs have also been virtually wiped out,” Canlas said.

IRRI

Since IRRI was established in Los Banos, Laguna on April 4, 1960 governments in the Asian region have been encouraging their farmers to use HYVs produced from IRRI research. With funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, IRRI initiated the “Green Revolution” in 1966 to “boost rice productivity and modernize Asian agriculture.”

Through the use of HYVs, rice production in Asia doubled from 270 million tons in 1966 to 600 million tons in 2000, but poverty and landlessness also worsened during the period, according to a fact sheet from the Pesticide Action Network-Asia and the Pacific [PAN AP].

Aside from high production costs that negated the high yields, HYVs also brought serious problems such as soil degradation, curtailment of farmers’ rights to use and re-use seeds and toxic traits in some genetically engineered rice varieties, among others, according to PAN AP.

PAN AP, along with the Kilusang Magbubukid sa Pilipinas [KMP, Philippine Peasant Alliance], Resistance and Solidarity Against Agrochemical Transnational Corporations [RESIST] and the Asian Peasant Coalition declared March 29 to April 4 this year, a “Week of Rice Action 2007”.

WORA 2007 activities aimed at “Celebrating and Protecting Rice Culture and Resisting Agrochemical TNCs” were held in India and in the Philippines where the IRRI was founded 47 years ago.

Rice bowl

Asia is the rice bowl of the world. Rice is the region’s staple food and is planted in some 134.5 million hectares in China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Myanmar and the Philippines. More than 2.5 billion people in Asia consume about 97% of rice produced in the region.

The livelihood of 70% of the people in Asia depends on rice production. The staple has been part of the rich culture and tradition of Asia as early as when it was first cultivated some 7,000 years ago.

Local and traditional rice varieties numbering about 140,000 have sustained Asian rice farmers and consumers for centuries. But the number dwindled drastically in the last four decades when HYVs were introduced by IRRI.

Critics of IRRI say it has destroyed indigenous rice production and brought millions of farmers into bankruptcy while bringing gargantuan profits to giant agrochemical firms like Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta.

Fields of agony

Ujjian Halim, in a monograph entitled “Rice lands: Fields of Agony and Fields of Hope said the liberalization of the rice industry started with the founding of the World Trade Organization [WTO] in 1995, which along with the Asean Free Trade Agreement [AFTA] resulted in opening up of rice markets that led, in turn, to the disempowerment of rice farmers.

Asia became the biggest dumping ground of cheaply-produced rice, mainly from the US. Asian rice imports rose 300% from 4.8 million tons to 15.4 million tons from 1990 to 1998 when WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture [AoA] gained headway.

From being a major rice exporter, the Philippines became dependent on rice importation reaching a peak in 1998 when 2.2 million tons was imported. Today, the country is Asia’s No. 1 rice importer with imports averaging 600,000 million tons each year.

In Taiwan, WTO agreements resulted in a shift towards production of “guaranteed price crops” that reduced the acreage of rice production from 364,000 acres in 1997 to 272,000 acres in 2003.

In southern India, hundreds of farmers who were forced to shift from rice to cotton farming became highly-indebted to agri-business companies and committed suicide after bad harvests of cotton.

Indonesian farmers lose 60,000 ha. of rice lands each year while about 10,000 ha. is converted to uses other than rice production in the Philippines every year.

“The rate of degradation of rice lands [due to HYV farming] has gone up in Asia, making rice farming unprofitable and costly. Despite the growth in rice production, 800 million people go hungry in Asia,” Halim wrote.

Seed control

The evolution of HYV technology into the most modern genetically engineered rice varieties also tightened the grip of the agrochemical giants over the key element in rice production: seeds. The founding of the WTO in 1995 also resulted in the signing by member countries of the agreement on Trade Related Aspects of International Property Rights [TRIPS] in the same year.

TRIPS tramples the rights of farmers and indigenous peoples to save, conserve, exchange and develop genetic resources and preserve traditional rice knowledge, Anak Pawis Rep. Rafael Mariano said in a paper read in a farmers’ conference in October 2005 in Quezon City.

TRIPS gives corporations the right to own rice varieties and genes through patents.

Dr. Angelina Briones board member of the Magsasaka at Siyentipiko para sa Pag-unlad ng Agrikultura said that more than 900 rice genes have already been patented by giant agrochemical corporations.

Fifty six per cent of 609 rice genes compiled in 2000 were owned by companies such as Dupont and Mitsui of Japan, while Syngenta is claiming to have invented 30,000 gene sequences of rice, Briones said in a paper read during the conference.

“The patent system is clearly a misappropriation of nature’s regeneration processes and the innovations of farmers over centuries. This is robbery in broad daylight of our common genetic wealth,” Briones said.

Main issue

Farmers say land ownership remains the main issue in the hardships that farmers in Asia face today.

Canlas said that while foreign agribusiness contributes to the displacement of farmers, resolving solely the problem of seed monopoly by agrochemical firms will not completely solve the misery of farmers.

“Landlessness experienced by millions of farmers in Asia is worsened by liberalization dictated by the WTO and the monopoly of agrochemical TNCs over rice production. We should fight the multinationals but we can do this more realistically by fighting to own the land we till,” Canlas said.

“Only through genuine agrarian reform can we hope to achieve sustainable agriculture,” he said.