‘Our land, our humanity’

(Today I have given my column space to my daughter, Veronica Pedrosa, formerly anchor of CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera. Here is her story.)

The brightest moon shone over the countryside around me. Tall coconut trees cast long shadows, as I walked between them seeking the essence of a nocturnal magic that seemed to cast a spell over the place, resetting the ties between the land and we who live off it. Human experience of nature is rarely written about in the news except in disaster and tragedy, as we’ve seen with Hurricane Irma this week, but take a walk into the woods as I did near Lipa, Batangas, a few days ago… there is something immediately soothing and uplifting about being surrounded by trees slowly but surely unfolding themselves and reaching inch by inch to the stars, offering themselves up to the world.

There are 330 million fruit-bearing coconut trees in the Philippines, so common that they’re barely noticed. Even coconut farmers tend to take them for granted, expecting the trees to bear fruit as they have always done, exploiting them as they are themselves exploited in a system of economic subjugation that some call slavery.

Coconuts are the Philippines’ top export, and yet 60 percent of the country’s 3.5 million small-scale coconut farmers live below the poverty line, earning less than P20,000 a year. The head of the Philippines Coconut Authority says the crop is crucial to nation-building, with nearly a quarter of us Filipinos depending on coconut for our livelihoods, and yet everyone knows it is an industry in a coma. There has been little progress in the sector since the time of the Spanish colonization.

The majestic and bountiful coconut tree has become a matter of national shame because of the notorious coco levy during the Marcos regime. The Presidential Commission on Good Government has tallied coconut levy assets at a mind-boggling P93 billion. The Coconut Industry Reform Movement’s Joey Faustino has called it the biggest scam of Philippine history and describes how money that was supposed to develop the industry has instead provided the means to create a monopoly of the copra/coconut oil. “They established the coconut monopoly to enrich themselves, not only this but also established the reasons why farmers have remained poor generation after generation, at the mercy of the international coconut oil market,” he told me.

Let me take you back to the place I described earlier. It is daylight now as your gaze lifts to the very top of the trees to see the fruit and flower. Most of the trees planted in the Philippines are considered senile, long past their years of prime productivity. But with a little TLC, each tree could more than double the number of nuts it produces per year from 40 to as many as 150 nuts.

This specific area is not a farm, the trees here are harvested half-heartedly for P5 a nut to middle men who sell them on to plants for more than P20 – another reason why farmers are trapped in a cycle of poverty. Nestor Limbo, who manages the place, showed me around explaining the situation, cracking jokes and telling me how much he prefers the life here than in the city where he was a driver. There is an alternative way forward for Limbo and anyone else for that matter.

Jun Castillo is the president of the Philippine Coconut Society and proprietor of Coconut House in Quezon Memorial Circle, purveyor of all kinds of coconut products including spine-tinglingly delicious non-dairy ice cream. He wants farmers to get the necessary knowledge and technology to care properly for the trees. He points out that coconut agriculture isn’t even taught at any university in the Philippines because of the myth that coconut trees don’t need caring, people wrongly think they can “just wait, harvest, wait, harvest.” Castillo suggests counting each tree and giving it a name – he explains how they respond quickly, like people, to better treatment. I think I’ll name a couple after people in my life, so I can remember to treat them better. Limbo thinks he’ll find a really great one to name after himself and make sure it’s looked after.

What’s needed is proper fertilization and irrigation, removing the spikes that have been used to climb the trees in the past because, Castillo pronounces that for them, this is torture. More dwarf seedlings could be planted that fruit after three years, rather than the usual 10. Most importantly, the people here could begin to use simple machines such as an oil press to cut out the middle man and make their own products to sell directly at markets, liberating themselves from the long fixation on copra and coconut oil that only benefit monopolies. These are methods Castillo has been teaching thousands of farmers, and says he has seen repeated successful transformations.

Farming has a central place in the Philippines’ national narrative written for the most part by the rich and powerful establishment, and yet actual farmers and their families are going hungry through systems designed to keep them poor.

There’s a scene in “Sinandomeng,” recently released at the TOFARM Film Festival, in which the main character explains why she won’t sell her land to developers even though her family would make millions of pesos. “Kapag yan ay wala, parang na rin wala akong pagkatao,” she says to her mother. (Directed by Byron Bryant, this gem of a film celebrates farming and is playing at the UP Film Centre tomorrow at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.)

It is time to plant the seeds of reform, and write new myths for farmers. So I find that I have become a farmer myself and that’s what I intend to do, finding roots in the land where I was born.