By Jan Vicente B. Pekas
This past week, I came across a post on social media that made me stop for a moment. It was about Benguet farmers selling their produce beside the street under the sweltering sun as they held up a shabby sign that says “15 per kilo”. In this day and age of near 100 peso signs in gasoline stations, increasing jeepney fares, and even the candies being so expensive, the prices of these vegetables were not only shocking but obviously one of severe desperation.
Come the few days and I was able to see other farmers beside Marcos Highway. Just like what I saw on social media, they were beside a truck filled with vegetables, under the unforgiving golden sun while holding up a torn-up cardboard, on it were the words “15 per kilo”.
But across the years this was always a consistent happening. Benguet farmers forced to throw away so much of their vegetables due to oversupply and the expensive price of delivering these produce to other markets. Just as so much food is wasted, there are just as many families all over this nation starving and in need of nutrition.
This week, a prayer vigil was set up in La Trinidad Trading Post for the halting of the planned importation of carrots and vegetable smuggling that contribute to the oversupply of highland vegetables.
Having grown up in the Cordillera, I and so many others have been fed these highland vegetables our whole lives. Across two decades, these same foods nourished me and helped me to reach this point in life. Even in the pandemic when food became much more valuable, there were farmer friends who shared with us, at a time when so much people started to hoard any and all foods they could find. There were still farmers who gave away and shared their produce.
In this fight for the farmers’ ability to sustain themselves, it is a fight for the whole region. Cordillera is a region of farmers. Amongst our friends and family, there is always a farmer. Especially those who migrated to Baguio City from the surrounding provinces, it is almost always due to the efforts of a farmer that helped them make the move and put their children to school and set them up for a better life.
No matter how advance we go as a region, no matter how much modernization is done to our homes, all that we see now, the college-graduate with a job, the child going to school in the early morning, and the development achieved in our cities, all of it is there because of a farmers’ efforts. We are all descendants of farmers.
In their fight against vegetable smuggling and oversupply, we must join them and amplify their calls. The farmers’ fight is the fight of all Cordillerans. **
