Escape From Poverty

MANILA: Saturday, 08 August 2015: I created the blog The Coop Crusader today (blogspot.com); I have since collected my earlier essays on the subject & related ones, 1 or 2 of them dating back to the year 2007, and will continue to write on it, because now I as writer and worker am firmly convinced that the multipurpose cooperative is the undiscovered modern-day Redeemer or Savior of the poor. Here are definitions of those concepts from the American Heritage Dictionary:

Redeem: restore the honor, worth or reputation of.
Save: set free from consequences of sin; rescue from harm, danger or loss.

So, which one should I choose as the correct role of a coop with respect to the members and their poverty? I choose both. Redeemer because the coop could restore the worth of a poor member as a dignified human being. Savior because the coop could set the members free from their debts and exploitative relationships with others. And those are exactly what I want to point out in this essay.

Actually, I have been writing about it earnestly in the last 5 years, in 40 long & short essays, about how cooperatives can help emancipate the poor farmers from poverty.

Note that I said help; we advocate and support, but the farmers have to help themselves. We must empower the farmers to set themselves free from the chains of insufficiency and live as they can in the world of abundance.

If you look at the image above, you will note that one bird (chicken) has discovered a way out and has taken that step to free itself from the confines of that concrete world. It has discovered that its world is not a prison all the time; it just has to discover where and when to get out of that confinement. The other bird is content in captivity. They are metaphors for farmers who are actively seeking to liberate themselves from the status of deprivation to the status of fulfilment and farmers who simply continue to live their dreary lives because they think they do not have any choice.

For the farmer to get out of scarcity and step into wealth, it's a long way, but he will get there. If only he can find the way.

Can the farmer liberate himself from poverty alone? As a farmer, once or twice you can increase your income many times over, but that is not setting yourself free from a hard life; once is not enough. That increase must be sustained. The new system you are in must nourish you economically. Sustainability is the surety that your income keeps rising as you work better or create more value. Without sustainability, you cannot set yourself free from poverty.

Speaking of sustainability, the Philippines' National Economic & Development Authority (NEDA) has what it thinks is the framework for the Filipino's escape from poverty (neda.gov.ph):

The Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016 adopts a framework of inclusive growth, which is high growth that is sustained, generates mass employment, and reduces poverty. With good governance and anticorruption as the overarching theme of each and every intervention, the Plan translates into specific goals, objectives, strategies, programs and projects all the things that we want to accomplish in the medium term.

"High growth that is sustained" means high Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product, neither of whose benefits ever translate to the advantage of the poor. Sustaining that growth is for the rich. "Generates mass employment" can only create so many jobs, while we have 1 million jobseekers (college graduates) added every year. And of course "good governance and anti-corruption" is problematic as ever – the one who promised good governance and anti-corruption utterly failed to solve poverty in this country. Getting rid of poverty is not as simple as he thought it was.

"Reduces poverty" means the Plan increases income so that more families will rise above the poverty line. An exercise in futility, as President Elpidio Quirino "committed (himself) to a policy of economic development as the only solution to the problem of poverty and under-production" (28 January 1952, State of the Nation Address, gov.ph), and yet more than 60 years later, millions and millions of Filipinos are still poor despite "economic development." The modern bugaboo of "over-population" cannot be the reason for poverty because we were only 22 million in 1952 (data360.org)!

Pertinent to poverty, on page 7 of the 21 June 2015 issue of The Philippine Star appeared a one-page ad sponsored by Buklod, a party lister, chaired by Benjamin R Punongbayan, founder of Punongbayan & Araullo, one of the largest public accounting firms in the Philippines (punongbayan-araullo.com). Is the political ad something to celebrate, as this is a private goal aimed at a public good? Let's see.

The headline and the subheads are these:

WE DARE TO DREAM

of breaking the cycle of poverty.
of providing all illegal settlers with decent homes.
of a Philippines able to sustain high economic growth.
of a new political order that is efficient and effective.
of an honest government.
of a truly new breed of leaders.

It's a terrific ad until you analyze it. I'm not going to discuss all those subheads of the Buklod ad because they are neither independent of each other nor mutually exclusive; in other words, what they make is a good laundry list. In any case, I consider the first subhead as the essence; thus, Buklod proposes breaking the cycle of poverty like this:

Not through handouts but with a person's own work and perseverance. We believe that the government's task is to give people the ability and opportunity to help themselves. ¶ Foremost of the government's tasks is to enable poor children to finish high school to give them a better chance to obtain gainful employment by solving the real problem that keeps them from school – by providing free meals and free transportation.

Buklod wants to produce high school graduates that are employable. Unfortunately, we cannot hand out jobs because we don't have any. Buklod doesn't know that right now we don't even have enough jobs to hand out to college graduates?! And if government build homes for illegal settlers, how about the millions more who are homeless and not illegal settlers?

So, how will the poor escape from poverty? I now leave the Buklod to their politics while I'd like to concentrate on the poor farmers; we have to help them:

escape from their usurer friends and foes,
escape from farming technologies that are costly and inefficient, and
escape from the merchants who dictate prices of farm produce to the disadvantage of producers.

Usury loves company. The usurer encourages the farmer to borrow more because, anyway, there is no collateral necessary. So the farmer loves the lender until he has to pay back the loan with his harvest. But he will borrow again because he thinks he has no choice.

Excess hates sufficiency. Hippocrates says, "Everything in excess is opposed to nature." The poor farmer applies too much fertilizer because his attitude is, "So much the better." So much for nature! Conservation is for the birds & bees. The seller encourages the farmer to buy more because it's good for business. Excess is good for business.

Traders love bargains too. That's how they make more money. The merchants will willingly give you the latest market information – that they have agreed among themselves to serve their common interest: profit. So, it is always: Sellers beware!

The obvious solution is? Empower the farmer. But I say no; rather, empower the group of farmers, as in a cooperative. Studying the matter in the last several years, since 2010 when ICRISAT headed by Filipino science thinker Director General William Dar discovered that small farmers benefited from collective action, I have reached the conclusion that the best way to emancipate the poor farmer from poverty is to organize the cooperative to be the farmer for the farmers. The coop has economies of scale that the single farmer does not have. The coop becomes the source of capital, so it is not costly; the coop applies the best technologies, so costs and losses are reduced; the coop deals only with direct consumers, so the coop captures the market. I say:

The coop as the farmer is the best thing that ever happened to agriculture!

I have been one of the training consultants of UMIC for an extension project of the Department of Agrarian Reform for the last 2 years; we have been working with quite a few cooperatives in Pangasinan and La Union. I have seen the enemy, and it is them: individually the farmers, collectively the merchants. Only the farmers will work for the benefit of the farmers. Each farmer is a creature of habit, almost all of them not wealth-yielding, I mean farmers and habits. I am now convinced that a farmer cannot escape from poverty; only farmers can, if they do it in a multi-cooperative manner. This is the Vice Chair of the Nagkaisa Multi-Purpose Cooperative in Asingan speaking!