Food, our edge
Flying in and out of Davao, you get to see the wide expanse of greeneries that is distinctly Mindanao. You see ridges and plains and plantations and patches of forest.
In Philippine cities, however, you see buildings and the promise of new townships where office buildings and facilities for business process outsourcing (BPO) awaits. These buildings loom above you, echoing an emptiness, the uncertainty of the future.
Amid pronouncements that BPOs are the job generators of the present time, we know that it is a service industry that needs clients to serve. Remove the clients, the industry collapses. Remove the company, the workers are left with nothing.
We fly out again and see the green landscape, alive, enticing.... and then we think of the food that is grown there. A lot of food.
There lies the strength of Mindanao, its agri-business and agriculture. We just hope and pray that local policy-makers will never be seduced by the metropolitan feel of high-rise and business outsourcing, and sustain a healthy balance of business and industries, and agriculture. While indeed we need to generate jobs, the most basic needs remain to be food and water. For as long as we can feed our people from the harvests of our own land, them we’re okay. Urbanization is good, but only when it brings development for all.
The earth remains to be the primary nurturer of life, let it breathe and live and nurture as it was designed to do.
“We are all visitors to this time, this place. We’re just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love … Then we go home.”
I don’t know who originally said that. Google isn’t helping much. It’s often used in websites espousing the earth and mankind and the indigenous. But the stark truth it tells me us has been repeatedly told us in several other ways, we just refuse to listen as the glitter of the urbanized and the urbane always outshine the rural and the rustic.
This connects well with Kahlil Gibran’s poem “On children”. It’s a poem that plucks at our heartstrings, reminding us of our role in this world: “You may give them your love but not your thoughts. “For they have their own thoughts. “You may house their bodies but not their souls, “For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
“You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
“For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”
We need to clean the lens by which we see the world, and look down to what has been nurturing us all along: the earth, our mother, and remember that we are just passing through. Our children will be reaping what we have sown, destruction included.