Many do not see that the current intense publicity to plant Jathropa in thousands of hectares nationwide is orchestrated by the Chinese industry and their Filipino counterparts which sell the expensive oil-extracting machineries. Many do not see that Jathropa, in fact, will dislocate marginal farmers and agricultural productivity.
If you place this side by side with GMA promising millions of hectares to the Chinese for the products they will buy from us, you begin to see that the great Chinese Bear may be our scourge and source of impoverishment more than the American Eagle or the Japanese Ninja.
That Jathropa will be a source of poverty rather than wealth is hard to discern for an eye which sees economics rather than socio-economics. The intense publicity for Jathropa begins with numbers, pushing figures on how much you can earn per hectare. On paper, if you make a computation, you can see the windfall you can earn. And without further investigation, you embark on a venture whose future is questionable.
Jathropa is first of all land-intensive. They talk of thousands of hectares before they can put up the expensive oil-extracting plant. If you do not achieve critical mass, the processing plant will never come and the Jathropa fruits you sell will rot in one warehouse, if it is uneconomical to transport to a distant plant. True, you are paid right away for your produce, but in the long term, if that critical mass is not achieved, the entire effort will grind to a halt.
So take the example of a drive by a Jathropa NGO, talking to the barangay captains, farmers, fishermen. You can actually plant it anywhere, even in salty shoreline soil. Jathropa, like the lowly Malunggay is a survivor. You can make a Jathropa fence in your backyard. And so Mang Juan the small farmer, convinced to make extra money, begins to plant it all over the place. The barangay captain gets more farmers to plant them. The agents will buy your produce but remember that it will take a few years before you can harvest from mature trees. They want to achieve critical mass, but will it come?
In Dumaguete, there is an intense war between farmers and the Jathropa missionaries of the DENR and the Philippine Forest Corporation. The DAR awarded the land to the farmers. Everything was fine until the Jathropa missionaries arrived. Seeing the potential for Jathropa production, the missionaries succeeded in reversing the DAR award. They will convert the farmer's land into a huge Jathropa hacienda. In Filipino, we call it 'lastiko', meaning, changing your mind midstream. Now, there is an angry mob of farmers seeking justice.
In other words, Jathropa will dislocate, first, farmers from their lands, and second, food production, and eventually, food security, because you plant a non-food cash crop, replacing food cash and subsistence crops. Non-food cash crops on a contract growing scheme has no socio-economic value for two reasons. First, most contract growing schemes are contractor-dependent and often one-sided in their favor. This is true for coffee, cacao, pineapple, whether the contractor is a multinational like Dole or a local like San Miguel. The problem is, as a contract grower, you are completely dependent on the contractor to whom you sell all your produce, no one else. They can command their own price and you are helpless.
Second, subsistence farming is the most critical source of survival for marginals because it yields food for the dinner table even if one does not have cash. If you have a kamote patch in your backyard, you have cheap nutrient vegetables everyday even if you are unemployed. Cash crops cannot match the socio-economic value of subsistence crops on the level of the marginals, the poorest of the poor. In the Philippines, about 70% are below the poverty threshold, and about 70% rely on agri/aquaculture for survival. Therefore, subsistence farming is very critical for us.
Jathropa, because it is land-intensive, will dislocate subsistence farming if employed on a massive scale. They argue that you can plant food crops in between the Jathropa. Theoretically yes, but if you consider the Dumaguete affair, such massive farming to justify the extracting machine, the reality is Jathropa will take over not only the land which they will convert it into Jathropa haciendas, but also over the farmers who will be employed as minimum-wage farm hands without subsistence crops.
The people pushing for Jathropa, Filipinos and Chinese, will benefit and the contract growers will get the crumbs from the pie. The Jathropa missionares are the government. like the DENR and the Philippine Forest Corporation, and the private sector like big land-owning agri-entrepreneurs controlling many contractors. In other words, Jathropa has the potential make the poor poorer.
But if we make our backyard fence with the lowly Malunggay rather than the alien Jathropa, we can see the social impact right away. I remember years ago going to a seminar attended by 300 people in Dimataling, a remote municipality in the Baganian Peninsula
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