Buguias: RP’s vegetable capital

Imagine this bountiful production from low-impact farming that uses traditional methods – applying only four to five metric tons of chicken dung per hectare for fertilizer and using simple canal flooding irrigation and manual operations. Harvest from Buguias’ top four vegetable products alone in an awesome 1.1 metric tons monthly. Throw in other favorite vegetables in various quantities and you’ll have an idea of how a so-called "salad bowl of the Philippines" looks like, where virtually every type of vegetable and fruit is grown on its fertile lands.

According to Ceferino Baniqued, agricultural center chief IV of the Bureau of Plant Industry, the number one produce is cabbage with a monthly harvest of 500,000 tons. Potato comes in second with a monthly haul of 300,000 tons, followed by sayote at 200,000 tons a month, and carrots with a monthly harvest of 100,000 tons. Other widely grown vegetables are cauliflower, broccoli, peas, Baguio beans, green onions, peachy, lettuce and sweet potatoes.

The town of Buguias has a most peculiar landscape — an area covering some 30,000 hectares of rolling hills, sloping at more than 80 degrees, tended by tribal highlanders engaged in low profile, low cost production. Straddling highland Buguias, one of 13 municipalities of Benguet province in the north, some 20 percent of the highlanders produce turn up on the dining tables of nearby Baguio City.

About half of the total output ends up in the so-called "bagsakan" taken there by middlemen. The more familiar "bagsakan" are in Divisoria in Manila, Cloverleaf in Caloocan and other cities of Metro Manila comprising of Quezon, Makati, Pasay, Mandaluyong, Pasig and Valenzuela and neighboring towns. Other parts of Luzon get 25 percent, southern Tagalog gets 10 percent and the Visayas five percent. Mindanao gets its vegetables from its own "salad bowl" in Bukidnon.

The communities in Buguias are two of the highland cultural minorities – Kankanai and Ibaloi – in the Cordillera Administrative Region, a socio-politico-economic and cultural grouping formed to speed up the development of the provinces of Apayao, Abra, Kalinga, Mountain Province, Ifugao, Benguet and Baguio City.

Among the Kankanais and Ibalois, men and women work the farms, (although some women stay behind to tend the homes). Together they work in land preparation, application of chicken dung, planting, construction of stretches of irrigation canals, care of the plants, harvesting, packing and transport from the farm to the roadside where lowland buyers ply their trade and pick the produce.

The majority of the farmers have organized themselves into cooperatives and federations. Some of them operate independently. There are some big ones which have their own trucks to deliver the produce to the traders in the towns and population centers.

Farmers pack their harvest into big baskets made of bamboo slats, which they bring to the roadside trading posts by hand or backpack style; some carry their merchandise on their heads. They sell by bulk, which means the middlemen will have to purchase wholesale the famer-family’s total harvest of vegetables.

Baniqued says that for loans, the farmers rely on private individuals – usually Chinese traders who buy their produce – rather then on banks. With paperwork and strict requirements, banking procedures are seen as too tedious, complicated and time-consuming. Also, the farmers are too far away from urban centers where commercial and government banks do business.

The common lending system works in a manner that the farmers find to their liking, where trust between two parties is enough guarantee. The Chinese traders give out loans that are only listed in their notebooks. When the time comes for the farmers to sell their produce to the lenders, loans are paid with interest.

In relation to government financial facilities, the highlanders are independent, receiving no funding from any agencies. What they do get, says Baniqued, is technical assistance in the form of research and development. For instance, as superintendent of the Baguio National Crop Research and Development Center from 1990 to 1999, he had the farmers trained in simple management skills.

His agency also taught the farmers a grading system for potatoes and integrated pest management (IPM). So when diamond back moths infested the cabbage plantations, diadegma cocoons were introduced into the farms, which morphed into insect-devouring worms.

The highlander farmers of Buguias have been farming for centuries and will probably do so for generations more to come. The productivity of their organic low-impact traditional farming will be a boon to health-conscious generations of today and the future. – PAJ News & Features