Chicken

From being an importer of poultry, the country is now bound to becoming an exporter of chicken products.

Last Thursday, San Miguel Foods inaugurated the first of 12 large-scale poultry farms in Davao del Sur. The sheer size of this farm is staggering. San Miguel outdid itself by building this facility in only four months.

The Davao del Sur farm is projected to produce 80 million birds per year. It is composed of 28 modules with five farmhouses, each spread over 66 hectares. It will produce the equivalent of Mindanao’s annual chicken consumption.

The scientifically designed farm maintains stress-free conditions for chickens to optimize their health and growth. The highest standards of biosecurity will be observed. The entire farm will be climate-controlled – an important factor given the realities of climate change.

The hotter temperatures we have been experiencing stress the chickens and stunts their growth. Hotter days ahead make them vulnerable to epidemics.

The Magnolia farm also features rainwater harvesting, discounting droughts as a factor that could threaten our production. The manure produced is used as fertilizer for farming cassava and corn, important raw materials for chicken feed. In all, San Miguel estimates that the Davao del Sur plant will generate 1,000 well-paying jobs for the host community.

Magnolia developed linkages with farmers in the surrounding areas, helping them plant corn and cassava. The backward linkage creates jobs and increases farmer incomes. The forward linkages to the processing technologies of San Miguel Foods enables added value to be retained in the local economy.

President BBM understood that this development is of such importance to building the nation’s food security that he graced the mega farm’s inauguration. Over the next couple of years, as the 11 other mega farms are built, we will have a chicken surplus.

The chicken harvested using the most advanced technology will be price competitive. This is how smuggling could be defeated: by quality local production at lower prices.

This is what the revolution in our agriculture looks like. It involves large capitalization, advanced technology, scientific methods and the extensive processing and distribution capacities of our corporations.

The revolution in our food production will have to be corporate-led. There is no other way.

Recall that only months before, Manuel Pangilinan-led Metro Pacific invested P1 billion in a vertical vegetable farm in Bulacan. Like the humongous San Miguel poultry farm, this vegetable farm uses the best technology that insulates the crop from the vagaries of the weather. It could supply quality vegetables cheaply – especially to the Mega Manila area where urban diets are oily and vegetable-free.

In addition to the high-tech vegetable farm, Metro Pacific also invested in dairy production. Pretty soon, we will not need to import all our dairy needs.

If we are to produce enough food for our people, we must corporatize food production. The large corporations have the financial clout to modernize our agriculture. They have the capital to bring in advanced technology. The more the conglomerates become involved in farms, the healthier our people will be.

As far as food production is concerned, big is beautiful.

For too long, we romanticized small farms. Against all logic, we held on to the hope that subsistence production will suffice to feed our population.

That romantic delusion about small farms brought us the food crisis we now confront. We import pretty much of what we eat. So inefficient has our agriculture become that smuggling food has become a lucrative racket.

Everything we eat costs more than most anywhere else. This diminishes people’s access to food and brought about widespread malnutrition. Our students endure not only a learning deficit but stunting as well.

Because we romanticized small farms, government invested a lot of money in breeding more carabaos. What our agriculture needed was rapid mechanization and investments in food processing. What we needed was better-managed farms and more efficient logistical systems. Investing in carabaos was not the way to food sufficiency.

The political Left, in particular, glorified the “peasantry” – the mass of inefficient producers making poor use of land which was our scarcest resource. That glorification of an imagined class was instrumental: the Left recruited from the rural poor to provide cannon fodder for their “people’s war” that might have installed an ignorant megalomaniac in power.

The “peasantry” was a fairy tale conjured by radical urban intellectuals to be the base of their millenarian insurrection. They pushed for subdividing the farms into small plots that produced only poverty and high levels of rural-to-urban migration.

Now, with large conglomerates such as San Miguel and Metro Pacific moving to rescue our agriculture from dysfunctional ideologies, the age-worn narrative of the political Left is in peril. We can no longer rely on small farms and subsistence methods to feed the nation. Our agriculture needs to be capitalized and acquire the best technology to finally flourish.

The Department of Agriculture wasted decades merely subsidizing traditional methods of farming. That reduced the nation to dependence on imported food. It condemned our people to what is among the most expensive food price regimes in the world.

Government has been, for too long, unable to think beyond a patronage mindset. That was another curse on our agriculture.

Now the corporations have taken up the cudgels for the nation. And they are doing so with conscious patriotism.

San Miguel, for instance, has put nation-building at the core of its corporate mission.