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July 23, 2010
Philippines has to start looking into its rich natural resources and tapping into them to produce wealth in its own turf rather than finding more countries in the farthest corners of the globe to send its people to for work. For all we know, we could be looking for wealth in all the wrong places when it’s right here under our noses.
Visit Israel and you will be surprised to find out that, despite being a small country with meager supply of water to its once barren desert soil, it has emerged as a top agricultural country, producing avocado, banana, tomato, vegetables and flowers, among others. One of the secrets of their success – their experts studied in schools of agriculture in the Philippines, including the University of the Philippines in Los Banos, Laguna.
We heard at UPLB these Israelis proclaiming before that we are lucky in the Philippines because we are blessed with abundant supply of water – an ingredient for the country to become an agricultural giant. Due to lack of water, the Israelis had to invent and resort to desalination which is converting sea water into potable and farming water and invented drip farming and later fertigation – the distribution of only the exact amount of water through computerized plastic hoses — to be able to make the most of the water that they have. They also perfected soil-less farming and over the years may have come out with other ways to succeed in farming with the meager supply of water that they have.
Ironically in the Philippines where the Israelis studied their agriculture, we continue to suffer due to our failure to harness fully and take advantage of the abundance of water in our midst. Perhaps, we take for granted this pristine wealth that we possess and react only when problems crop up such as the present water crisis in Metro Manila – a crisis surprisingly amidst rains triggered by a big typhoon. Due to the low level of water at Angat Dam, the main supplier of water to the metropolis, the precious water had to be rationed in big parts of the big city. In the meantime, the government adopted measures like cloud seeding to induce rain over the dam, plugging of pipe leaks and tapping of new sources of water.
Ecological changes have also contributed to the water crisis. We have been careless in the protection of our environment, thus the drought and long dry spell. We should all contribute to protecting and conserving the environment and our natural resources, especially water, to avoid another major disaster that spells our doom.
But water is only one of our squandered resources. The destruction of our rainforests and the continuous devastation of our mountains by illegal loggers and “kaingineros” had nature’s fury crush and sweep our lands and mountains without mercy leaving us with unprecedented death tolls and property losses. The newly appointed Secretary of Agriculture, Proceso Alcala should lead the way to harnessing our country’s human resource. Its time the government fund agricultural researches such as those done in UP Los Banos and Central Luzon State University in Munoz, Nueva Ecija. Other neighboring countries send their scholars to these schools to learn our technology and use this knowledge to leave us eating dust as they build up their agriculture and manufacturing industries and emerge as one of the economic powers in Asia.
Calling Secretary Alcala. Time to stop wasting our resources and starting developing them. Let’s move this country on to progress before we find it in a bottomless pit where we surely can’t find our way out, shall we?