By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
The present OIC Regional Executive Director of DA-CAR, Atty. Jennilyn M. Dawayan, has her plate very full with the innumerable problems of farmers in the region. Her mind can dart from one issue to another.
She rightly fits the position. Being a lawyer, she can readily spot the real issues from the false ones troubling the regional office of the Department of Agriculture. And being a CPA nobody can razzle dazzle her with accounting figures without any valid basis.
Above all, she is a professional manager having gone to the Asian Institute of Management. Professional managers are what this country badly needs. Not politicians who are our collective curse. Our crosses to bear as we go up the stairs in our quest for a better life.
Of late, she has been going through sleepless nights to divert our local vegetable farmers from their inexorable march to financial perdition. What with many of them opting to throw their harvests into ravines or roadsides as current prices would not even be enough to answer for transportation costs to market.
At first blush everybody was saying the cause was a glut in supply. Of farmers just planting the cash crops they have been used to without finding out who planted what among their fellow farmers. Then from the director’s investigation things were not due to that. The demand for the crops in question were just commensurate with the supply or the harvests. No oversupply. The problem was, according to her, the produce were not being transported to intended buyers.
What immediately struck me when she said that was, “Where were the local politicians? What were the respective local governments of the farmers doing to alleviate the sufferings of their constituents? Are they only interested during election times?
Now through Atty. Dawayan’s leadership, institutional buyers were got in touch with and DA trucks the past weeks, up to now, are being used to transport the veggies to bulk buyers in the lowlands. Great for the farmers. Great incompetence of local politicians.
Then something came to mind. Why is the Regional Executive Director acting like the mother of the farmers? While it is her job, I could not help but scratch my head about how stupid our farmers can be. Why didn’t they use their brains to look for the right buyers for their produce? They are matured people already. In all the years they had been in the business of farming, they should have figured out what to do during such contingencies.
But then again, they are known to be regular visitors to the Casinos whenever they made it big in the past. Not all of them but many of them. How stupid can they get.
The government surely cannot be expected to waste its time and resources catering to the needs of cry babies. People who appear not to have heard of hard times or rainy days.
The bottom line as to the main cause of many famer’s problems here is lack of education. We have been going to school for centuries already. Can’t some people think critically or practically?
Common sense is all it takes and some discipline.**
