The Inanglupa Solution Plus

MANILA: Inanglupa translates literally as Motherland, the preferred translation, but which I prefer to translate as Mother Earth, because the name refers first of all to the soil. Inanglupa, the Philippine movement founded last year by former Director General of ICRISAT William Dar, has been inspired by Bhoochetana, the highly successful joint project of the State of Karnataka in India and ICRISAT under William Dar, and about which I have written 22 long essays, the first one being "The Bhoochetana Revolution. Political will applied with science" (04 July 2012, A Magazine Called Love, blogspot.com). In rejuvenating their soils by Bhoochetana, Indian farmers earned additional incomes of a minimum Rs4,470/ha for sunflower to a maximum Rs23,090/ha for peanut that year. They were just starting.

Bhoochetana means revival of the soil; this was one of the things that ICRISAT taught the farmers of Karnataka to do: Find out what plant nutrients are lacking in your soils, supply those so that your crops can feed well, grow well, and give you the best harvests. Find out about your soil pH too. My posterized image shows DAR Consultant-UPLB Professor Butchoy Espino showing a farmer at the village of Bantay Intsik in Sison, Pangasinan how to use the soil pH meter – testing in several places in the same field, they found the soil acidic, between 5 and 6, where 7 is neutral and best for crops, while 8 and above is alkaline. A neutral pH ensures that the nutrients in the soil can be absorbed by crops through their roots.

Inanglupa is a social movement that advocates inclusive, science-based, resilient and market-oriented development in the Philippines" (inanglupa.org). That is all based on what ICRISAT learned with William Dar as DG for an unprecedented and quite fruitful 15 years. As far as I understand the terms:

(1)     Inclusive

This means, in agriculture, you include the poor farmers as actors working to help themselves. They do not simply wait and watch; they participate in the planning, programming and project implementation. Thereby, they empower themselves and ultimately own the projects designed with and for them, including the vision and the mission.

(2)     Science-based

Essentially, this refers to the use of technologies and systems that have lately been proven by scientists to be productive and economical. Two examples: micro-dosing from ICRISAT and the irrigation technique of alternate wetting & drying (AWD) from IRRI.

Micro-dosing: My estimate is that a farmer in the Philippines can save 9 bags out of 10 if he applies micro-doses of fertilizer, that is, giving each crop hill a bottle capful of the material. Otherwise, the Filipino farmer usually broadcasts his fertilizer so that the granules fall where they may, so that where the roots don't grow, the fertilizer is wasted.

Alternate wetting & drying: AWD saves the farmer irrigation water without sacrificing yield. The field is alternately flooded and drained; the draining can be up to 10 days, depending on the soil, weather, and the growth stage of the crop. With AWD, rice farmers have in fact reported yield increases in the Philippines books.google.com.ph) and in Vietnam (irri.org). AWD is a technology whose time has come, considering the advent of climate change and the fact that irrigation dams are drying up because of loss of watersheds that supply them the precious liquid.

(3)     Resilient

I take the term to mean adaptable to climate change. The best example of a modern crop that is resilient to the max is IRRI's so-called Green Super Rice (GSR). GSR is Green because, for instance, your fertilizer need is lower, and less nitrogen fertilizer means less greenhouse gas emitted such as nitrous oxide. GSR is Super because (a) it grows well and yields even better than the usual rice under conditions of drought, or flood, or soil infertility, and (b) it tolerates many a pest and disease. To explain its multiple astounding abilities, GSR is actually not a single cultivar but many cultivars.

I take resilient to also mean sustainable, referring to the ability of some environmental components to replenish themselves naturally. For instance, farming cannot exist without irrigation water, which comes from the watershed near or far, and which is dominated by the forest. Farms cannot exist without the forest. Lowland farmers must take care of the forest nearby, not abuse it by small-time but constant logging, if they want their irrigation water to keep coming for their crops.

(4)     Market-oriented development

If it is for the common good, which then becomes the common better, that would be development; otherwise, it is only the enrichment of the few. Market-oriented here means the farmers produce for the markets that they have arranged for or are connected to directly, without merchants or traders as go-betweens. The farmer must now transform himself into a businessman. In my view, not only to survive but to thrive, the farmer must learn what I call The Love Triangle of Business: Product Ability + Profit Ability + Sustain Ability (in my essay of 13 December 2014, A Magazine Called Love, blogspot.com). The individual farmer produces more at less expense and maintains his business; he arranges with the market what it needs, and supplies these directly.

All that is Inanglupa as I see it, the Inanglupa Solution. Now I say there is a better business than a single-farmer business; what I am about to offer is the Inanglupa Solution Plus:

The cooperative as the business arm of farmers.

This essay was triggered by a friend, Mario, directing me to the column of Rudy Romero at the Manila Standard Today titled "Co-ops should receive higher priority" (13 August 2015, manilastandardtoday.com). Coops are under the supervision of the Cooperative Development Authority (CDA), a hardly known agency under the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). 2015 is the Philippine Coop Centennial Year of the passage of the Rural Credit Cooperation Law (Act 2508) in 1915. A pity, but after 100 years, we don't have a proud culture of cooperativism in this country. Romero says there is "apparently low priority accorded to" cooperatives by the DTI, the mother agency of the CDA, which explains the latter's modest office in Quezon City, not in Makati City where the DTI complex is located.

Romero says "the cooperative appears to be an essentially Western concept, for the oldest and most successful cooperatives are found in the US and Western Europe, particularly Scandinavia." In the Philippines, "the cooperative ethos does not appear to have become deeply rooted." The farmers' cooperative marketing associations (Facoma) came and went. There are very few coop success stories.

Romero says "the three principal failure factors of coops have been incompetence, mismanagement and dishonesty." Now here I come proposing a new form of cooperative as a way out of poverty of the poor Filipino farmers. This is the Super Coop that I have been writing about (see my "IMODest Proposal. A Coop Revolution for millions of poor farmers," 28 September 2013, A Magazine Called Love. blogspot.com). The idea had slowly sprung over the years from the warrantage success story of ICRISAT that I first wrote about 7 years ago (see my "Science's 4-Way Test. If it tests good, I must be in the drylands," 04 December 2008, A Magazine Called Love, blogspot.com).

Noting Romero, how does a Super Coop thwart any appointment of an incompetent official, disrupt any occasion of mismanagement, and preclude any attempt at dishonesty? The Super Coop has a different composition of the policy-making Board of Directors, as it is composed of representatives of the local government, scientific institutions, business, private citizens, religious, civic & volunteer groups, philanthropy, and the peasantry – any sin of omission or commission should immediately be apparent and taken care of.

Only the cooperative can combat the deprivation by usurious lenders and unscrupulous merchants of farmers benefitting from the chain of values produced by their harvests.

"Coops should receive higher priority." That is why Inanglupa, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Agrarian Reform, and the Department of Trade & Industry should support cooperatives by the billions of pesos more.

The best thing to do for the poor farmers is to get them out of poverty! And this we can do via Super Coops. I call them Super Coops because they are more powerful than the usual coops. 1st, the members of the board come from different sectors of society, as I have explained above: 2nd, the coop is the collective marketing arm of the farmers.

What can a Super Coop do that individual farmers cannot?

(1)     You want sustainable farmers? Get them out of their debt cycle! The community can do that collectively through the cooperative. Even the American Black candidate for US President Ben Carson knows something about it. He says, “What the Republican Party needs to do is come out and discuss more the kinds of relationships and the programs that will actually bring people out of poverty, that will give them the ability to use their God-given talents to rise, rather than to simply be satisfied in a dependent position in society" (Randy DeSoto, 13 August 2015, westernjournalism.com).

(2)     You want sustainable agriculture? You must have economies of scale, and the coop is the one to do it for any number of farmers united as a group. What group is better for small farmers than the multi-purpose cooperative? For the farmers to be sustainable, the MPC can take care of their farm and family needs from cultivation to harvest to processing to marketing. 

(3)     You want crop diversification? You can have individual farms growing different crops in a corporate enterprise. Individual farmers can plant multiple crops in their single farms; the coop can manage different crops in different farms for targeted marketing.

(4)     Coops are inclusive of the poor. Individually, the poor farmers cannot escape the clutches of unscrupulous moneylenders and merchants; collectively, the multi-purpose coop is designed so that they can. 

(5)     Coops can afford to be science-based. Actually, today all farmers are science-based, that is, they use modern technologies and systems, except that they abuse the use of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation water. Only a coop that supports their farming can dictate on them to practice conservation agriculture. 

(6)     Coops can run as a sustainable business. A farm has to be run as a business concern, considering costs and returns all the time. Individual farmers are notorious for not minding the economics of what they are doing; the coop will force them to truly mind their business.

(7)     Coops can give you market-oriented development. Individual farmers are almost always the victims of a buyer's market – the merchant always wins. A coop can be organized so that it can successfully connect the farmers directly with consumers, so that the farmers enjoy the values added along the chain from production to consumption.

The Inanglupa Solution Plus is? Inclusive, science-based, resilient and market-oriented development (totally learned from ICRISAT under William Dar); the development is brought about through multi-purpose cooperatives empowered to become the business arms of poor farmers (my modification of the ICRISAT's public-power of science-private-professional-philanthropy-peasant partnership paradigm). If farmers do not learn to work together and become businessmen, they will never be able to rise from their poverty and will always live in Mahinanglupa!