Tobacco Farmers Ask Gov't Help to Plant Alternative Crops

Source from:  Newsbreak 07/02/2009

Planting tobacco is laborious and more costly, they say. A group of tobacco farmers from the Ilocos region on Tuesday called on the Department of Agriculture (DA) to initiate programs that would help them shift to alternative crops, citing increasing capital and labor requirements of planting tobacco. The Solidarity of Peasants Against Exploitation (STOP Exploitation) pointed out that the five-year-old Tobacco Regulation Act (or Republic Act 9211) mandates the national government to promote cooperative programs to assist tobacco farmers in developing alternative farming systems, planting alternative crops, and creating other livelihood projects. STOP Exploitation claims to represent 10,000 tobacco farmers from the provinces of Ilocos Sur, Ilocos Norte, La Union, and Abra. There are 40,000 tobacco farmers in the region, according to data from the National Tobacco Administration. "Growing tobacco is like nursing a child. You have to be alert every hour of the day. All the family members is tied to look after the tobacco. And in the trading season, they would realize that their labor did not pay off with the small profit that they got from selling tobacco leaves," said STOP Exploitation chair Avelino Dacanay, who grew up in a family of tobacco farmers in La Union. A 2007 survey by anti-smoking advocates showed that tobacco farmers tend to shift to non-tobacco crops because of high production cost and high labor requirement. Around 345 of the 987 farmers surveyed said they want to shift to other crops because growing tobacco is laborious, and 237 farmers believe that it is cheaper to plant food crops than tobacco. Since the soil in Ilocos Sur is dry, farmers said it requires an irrigation system, simple water ponds, or shallow tube wells, which would allow them to plant rice, corn, or other food crops. Dacanay suggested that the Aringay River in La Union and other streams should be developed to provide an irrigation facility for the province. STOP-Exploitation said that the tobacco farmers cannot rely on the 15-percent share of their provinces from the tobacco excise tax, since most of the funds go to projects not beneficial to the them. Among the objectives of Republic Act 7171 or an Act to Promote the Development of the Farmers in the Virginia-Tobacco Producing Provinces is to create livelihood projects that would develop alternative farming systems to enhance the farmers' income. From 2004 to 2006, Commission on Audit reports of Ilocos Sur, for example, showed that million-worth of projects that are not of much help to the tobacco farmers were improperly charged to RA 7171 funds. Dacanay also criticized as "exploitative" the contract growing system being promoted by the NTA. The NTA, the government agency tasked to monitor the tobacco industry and the welfare of its farmers, selects their own tobacco cooperators or partners who will engage in contract-growing with leaf buyers Universal Leaf Philippines, Trans Manila Inc., Fortune Tobacco and Continental Leaf, among others. "Contract-growing schemes take away 18 to 22 bags of fertilizers from the capital of the farmers while traditional tobacco growing entails only two to four bags. Chemical pesticides for contract-growing require two quarts per hectare, while half a quart is needed for the traditional growing," he explained. In a special report published earlier, Newsbreak cited complaints by farmers who lose their freedom to choose to whom they can sell their tobacco harvests because of contract-growing. It's an arrangement where manufacturers and tobacco buyers advance the money that the farmers need to buy fertilizers, seedlings, and farm implements. Farmers can therefore sell their produce only to the lenders, and thus lose their bargaining power. Enditem