THE LEGAL FRONT
The current developments in our agricultural sector are very encouraging, particularly, the recent grant of a $600 million loan from the World Bank to help modernize the sector and optimize the food supply chain. This is the kind of people-oriented development that I have been hoping for since I learned that PBBM would personally handle the Agriculture portfolio.
The loan grant, of course, is only a preliminary step that will not strengthen our food security or positively affect people’s lives until fully tapped and utilized. A lot more needs to be done and a lot of challenges must be overcome before we can attain these goals. In blunter terms, our agricultural plans may be the best, but they will not serve us well if their implementation is faulty or deficient.
Implementation can fail for many reasons attributable to man, among them, lack of foresight, lack of focus, inconsistency, errors, and many other frailties and omissions. This is the lookout of government and this is where the leadership of PBBM can be tested.
Separately from implementation, factors beyond man’s control likewise exist that can hinder or thwart even the best-laid plans. Among these are the acts of nature traceable to the natural order of things in our universe, or that might have been brought on, aggravated by, or are merely the natural consequences of man’s otherwise usual survival activities. All these latter factors can happen in agriculture when we call on nature, or act with nature, as our partner.
We must also recognize and make allowances for our inherent vulnerabilities, i.e., those arising from our country’s geography and location. We sit astride the Pacific Ocean, the world’s biggest reservoir of liquid water. Our equatorial location likewise exposes us to the full force of the sun’s heat. When we disturb nature, the sun’s heat can churn and vaporize the water, spawning angry winds and heavy rains. This is the typhoon, a manifestation of nature’s displeasure that, many times, we can only adapt to and endure as best as we can.
Typhoons unfailingly visit us, year after year. In 2013, for example, a bad typhoon – Yolanda – visited us. It was the strongest we then experienced, leaving more than 6,000 people dead, 600,00 displaced, and damage to property of approximately ₱95 billion, not to mention the costly disruption of commercial and other activities, and the inevitable reconstruction, rehabilitation, and other restorations that followed. Aside from these, Yolanda also caused a humanitarian crisis, population displacement, and severely tested everybody’s, particularly the government’s, response capabilities.
Other than typhoons, we also suffer floodings when rains are heavy and beyond the capacity of our soil and natural reservoirs to absorb and contain. In other parts of the world, flooding also occurs when excessive polar ice melt in response to unnatural and prolonged high environmental temperatures. In contrast with these, is the drought that occurs when – due to the heat, such as the one we are presently experiencing – nature simply dries up. These disturbances inevitably affect plants, animals, livestock, agricultural production, and us, ultimately.
From these perspectives, our agricultural endeavors are fraught with risks and we cannot afford to be complacent nor simply blame nature or our vulnerabilities for these disasters. We must proactively act to avoid these disasters. An area ripe for action is risk mitigation through the close consideration of nature’s contributions – the soil, the air, the wind, the climate, and the affected environment that our agricultural efforts need. We must also recognize that if we are negligent, less than respectful, or if we fail to adjust to nature’s demands, nature can respond through lessons showing its displeasure; changes, among others, in the climate we have known and have learned to live with, is one such warning.
We should never forget that we exist as part of nature; how we act and behave towards the environment partially dictates nature’s responses. As emerging evidence shows, we significantly contributed to the causes that have given rise to the nastiness that nature has been showing us. To name a few of the man-made causes of the global warming that leads to our climate change, our power generation, transportation, and manufacture of goods using fossil fuels and the cutting down of carbon dioxide-absorbing forests, are major culprits. Significantly, nature had warned us that our actions have already been earning its ire through increasing and unusual changes in its characteristics. Unusual heat is one such warning.
If we have therefore been reaping the whirlwind, the reason is our obstinacy: we have been opting to sow the wind through actions in disregard of nature and its demands, thereby risking dangers to the earth and to our society.
Let us all hope that these developments would serve as sufficient lessons for us and for the government, if it is serious in its agricultural efforts, to actively mind and to institutionalize measures consistent with nature and against climate change. ([email protected])