The other day, a young mother with her baby braved the strong rain and wind to go to a law office to have some documents accomplished. These were requirements to claim some financial assistance from the government. She is a vegetable farmer and her lettuce plants due to be harvested within a week did not make it. They were totally destroyed by floods caused by Typhoon Egay. Whatever small capital she had was totally wiped out.
Her father, also a vegetable farmer, suffered the same fate.
So, who to turn to?
Surely neighborhood usurers would be waiting in the lurk, misty eyed over the young mother’s farm. With that as collateral, the money lenders would be only too willing to shell out the cash badly needed to be able to replant as soon as that becomes feasible. Or just to survive.
Such is a familiar sight in the Cordillera’s mountain vegetable farms. Even in other areas where farmers have only small plots to their names. Many of them would eventually lose their small land holdings.
The most practical remedy would have been crop insurance which we had been talking about since time immemorial. Finally, about a year or two ago, we started hearing of some flickering efforts by government to start such a program. But going by the performance of government and its officials, it will take decades and decades if not a century, before the program can become reliable and effective in achieving its vaunted purpose, if at all.
In the meantime, our small farmers just have to rely on themselves. Relying on “ayuda” or dole-outs would be stupid, to say the least.
The simplest but effective thing for them to do is to save for rainy days and emergencies. Easy to say, but a Himalayan task to achieve. It requires a lot of discipline and tenacity, for years and years.
For it is a common sight of farmers when they hit big to buy things they don’t badly need but which are just intended to brag to neighbors and others in the community.
Want to see brand new pick-up trucks of all sorts? Drive around vegetable farm communities and you will see what we mean.
Others are even more stupid. They make some money and before you know it, they would be coming home bleary eyed and destitute having spent a whole night gambling in the casino or carousing in night spots. With all their money gone they would be back to where they were a few months before that– as poor as rats. Having no more money, they would have to lazily pick up their tools and start all over again.
Indeed, stupidity and lack of discipline go a long way in keeping people down at the bottom of socio-economic hierarchies.**