Crossroads: Food security vs ethanol vs mining vs climate change

By MARY LOU O. MARIGZA
www.nordis.net

Food security and food sovereignty had always been related to the land problem. It is a pitiful state of affairs that those who till the land and provide food for our table have for the longest time been deprived of the right to own the land they till. Blood, sweat, tears, hunger, dispossession and ejection are the sorrowful realities they face.

In our hunger for clean energy and more production to feed a hungry world, our farmers have been the least of the concern of state planners and investors, especially foreign investors who have to keep their deep pockets full and their economies rolling. Poor Filipino farmers at the receiving end.

This is the problem faced by the farmers of San Mariano town in Isabela who are facing a rich giant conglomerate of Japanese investors and local sugarlords that needs the energy and the clean environment “pogi points” to turn sugarcane to bio-ethanol for electricity and transport fuel. Theoretically, the bio-ethanol enterprise will provide the necessary shift from fossil fuels to renewable resources for energy and transport that was mandated into law through the BioFuels Act.

However, what is hidden in the equation is the gargantuan shift from farming for food to farming for energy. To use the analogy of Ka Daning Ramos of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, the farmer who produces the chicken for the market will now be reduced to buying chicken cubes if he wants to eat chicken. The farmers who will be contracting with the bioethanol company will now be reduced to buying all their needs including rice since they will be forced to plant only “ethanol” to meet the company’s quota. Even their language has changed. The farmers of San Mariano no longer say they will plant sugarcane, no, they will plant “ethanol”.

The International Fact-finding Mission to San Mariano, Isabela last week of May was conducted by several experts on food security and land rights on the national and international level. This is a follow-up activity to an earlier national Fact-finding mission last February to probe into land grabbing vis a vis the biofuels project.

The IFFM documented cases already brought as early as 2005 to the municipal, provincial and national levels of the government and heard new cases of landgrabbing with the open knowledge of government agencies like the DENR, DAR, Land Bank and the like. The land problem is so massive and deep but the tillers of the soil stood their ground – “Laban kung laban” as they said it so eloquently. They had to confront a bureaucracy that was clearly washing its hands off the problem or outright sitting on the complaints while they “study the matter further” until the next fact-finding mission maybe. They gritted their teeth when a legal officer accused them of “nagpapaloko” even when they presented evidences of the scam and fraud in several barrios of San Mariano.

San Mariano has a history of land struggle that started when the logging of the forest region started. The first to be affected are the Agtas. They have been displaced by migrants who have heard of the land frontiers and the richness of the Isabela soil. The vast expanse of logged over areas that had water resources and roads however bad became home to communities of Ifugaos, Ilokanos and Ibanags and the Agtas who later realized they have to claim some piece of land with “paper” ownership and stay in one place if they have to show proof of their claim to these paper documents.

In one barangay, an Ifugao settler who has been a local official has been “resourceful” to title his ownership over hundreds of hectares. In Ilocos, he would have been a big landlord but in San Mariano, he is just one of the big guys. San Mariano is so big that a lot of people can easily settle and make the land productive. And therein lies the problem. The land in San Mariano is up for grabs even if it is knowledge that these lands have been occupied since the tillers can remember or were themselves born there.

In the midst of these land problems, a Japanese funded consortium is planning to lease/rent lands for sugarcane plantations for bio-ethanol. What will be left of the farmers then? Only the knowledge that once upon a morning they “own” a piece of land and in the afternoon, another has claimed it by paper documents? What will they put on their tables if all they will be planting are “ethanol”? After all, 11,000 hectares is not a small number. And would 11,000 hectares suffice if there is crop failure due to weather and pests? Where will the farmers now get their food (and it is knowledge also that most of the rice fields have been converted to yellow or animal corn fields)?

And yet another specter is looming in San Mariano – mining companies have applied for permit to mine the areas for minerals. Where will the farmers of San Mariano get their food? # nordis.net