By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
People with talents or brains in the rural areas would go to the cities to get educated or get employed and with luck and industry they end up becoming successful businessmen or professionals. Most of them permanently get settled where they got established, going home only when Filipinos traditionally troop to the bus stations, seaports and airports. These are during Christmas, Holy Week or on the last days of October so they could go and light some candles and lay flowers on the graves of their long lost loved ones.
After the drinking and merry making, they troop back to the cities several pounds heavier and perhaps more relaxed as a good amount of the accumulated stress from the daily grind of past months or even years might have been shed off. So they leave again their hometowns leaving relatives who chose to stay due to inability to make it elsewhere. The cycle would be repeated through the years until childhood friends cannot be found anymore for their having passed to the life hereafter or for having gone abroad. Then the visits become less and less frequent, until they totally stop.
This is the typical scenario. So much so that some barangay grade schools have to combine grades due to lack of pupils. Grades one and two could be combined in one classroom and are taught by one teacher. In some instances there are three grades in one classroom. Such a situation was the same in schools in the prairie in America when there were only a few kids on a wide swath of former grasslands converted to agricultural holdings.
In my barangay in Mountain Province, they are about to adopt the same system as many of the people there have migrated in search of greener pastures. So many houses are vacant being feasted on by termites. For who could endure staying in a mountainous place with landholdings consisting of only a few square meters and are scattered on the sides of steep mountain sides far away from each other. A year of back breaking labor to farm these might result in a nice view of rice terraces but would only generate enough food just to keep body and soul together. Nothing more.
This resulted in a dream of mine to go back there and try to give back by generating some income opportunities for those who had no choice but to stay. This was inspired by the vast market for turmeric tea. One local company is now operating nationwide producing that kind of tea.
As to marketing the stuff, I guess I had enough experience having marketed the Golden Granola when I was a law student in Metro Manila. I am quite confident I would be able to navigate again the Metro Manila markets.
How will producing turmeric benefit holders of teeny-weeny farms in the middle of nowhere? If they can be assured that my company will buy whatever turmeric they would produce then perhaps they will take the trouble of planting such a non-traditional cash crop.
And so I went around investigating the things that I would need. The most expensive of course would be the machinery and implements to produce the tea. These will mean about P0.5 million and then you have to house these in a decent way. All in all, a million or two pesos can get the project going.
As to labor, while it is almost impossible to get labourers there and in nearby Sagada, perhaps some labourers can be imported from the lowlands. And the senior high school students there can be hired on weekends as some people there are doing right now.
The biggest problem, however, when I am thinking about it over and over again is me. For, truth to tell, I am not a farmer by heart. Will I be excited enough to move and shake to start the business itself?
Knowing that I would need I pickup truck, I started planning on how to make a junk truck standing on the yard run again. That excited me. But the business? So so.
Can a business that does not excite you really take off?
Will I be excited enough to endure all the sacrifices and hard work that starting a new business entails. At my age?
Perhaps I will just start working on that pickup truck. That sure excites me. Then I will take it from there.**
