BUGUIAS, BENGUET — We first met Cris Guzman while he was behind the wheel of his small and rickety Elf truck at the edge of a cliff. He wasn’t going anywhere. But he was busy hauling his potatoes almost effortlessly.

	The Igorot are resourceful farmers but they cannot compete with the influx of cheap vegetable imports [Howie Severino/I-Witness]

His newly harvested spuds were moving swiftly up a steep mountainside from fields half a kilometer below. Guzman, a young man with a toothless grin, had helped build a simple tram system powered by his truck that seemed to conquer the formidable terrain. 

His father’s generation had to carry on their backs whatever they grew on the slopes; most people around the Cordillera mountain range still do that today. But Guzman can just rest in the driver’s seat on the roadside and spin his truck’s jacked-up, tireless rear axle, driving the elevated steel cable that would transport a small but stable cable car large enough to fit four or five baskets of produce. For travelers like us desiring unique views of Benguet’s vegetable terraces, the makeshift cable car also offered a spectacular ride.

Guzman and his farmer-neighbors had pooled their savings to build the P100,000-system, anchored by concrete-based steel posts along its path. That helped to address one of the biggest competitive disadvantages of farming on steep terrain—the enormous amount of labor needed to carry goods to the road.

It’s the kind of Igorot resourcefulness that enabled the Kankan-ey and Ibaloi people to farm in these rugged mountains in the first place. But improvised tram systems are still far from enough to challenge the low production costs of imported vegetables arriving on our shores, most of it grown on vast plains in temperate climes in Australia and China.

Cheap vegetables from abroad started flooding the market last year, much of it allegedly smuggled. That resulted in a drop in prices for consumers, but it also left many growers in the Cordillera bankrupt. Those like Guzman who have an edge in the means of production have had a better chance of surviving in the cutthroat market. The uproar from the local industry led the government to try to curtail the imports, leading to a slight recovery in the Benguet industry. But the smuggling continues, and Guzman knows that although he has overcome a mountainous obstacle with an ingenious contraption, the odds against growers like him are rising.

Even without the imports, in fact, there is little control or predictability about the vegetable industry as a whole. So many factors can doom a harvest—typhoons, landslides, and more commonly, a glut of the same vegetable—that when a farmer makes money, he is said to hit the “jackpot.”

Guzman himself says stoically, “Sugal ang paggugulay (Growing vegetables is a gamble).” 

But there he was with his potatoes finally all on the roadside. The rest of his family pitched in to load them onto the truck. Guzman put the rear tires back on the Elf and prepared for the longer journey south to the main vegetable trading center in La Trinidad, the provincial capital. This time he would be bringing along his very pregnant wife Me-an so she could give birth in a hospital in or near Baguio City. This harvest might just be enough to pay the bills. But Guzman was worried: Potato prices had been diving and he had no way of knowing what they would be after they completed the six-hour journey to La Trinidad, much of it over a portion of the Halsema Highway the locals like to call Abortion Road.

Guzman had already been sufficiently spooked by the impact of the imports on vegetable prices in the last year. True, the recent collapse of global trade talks in Cancun, Mexico has bought some time for local producers, whose associations’ main strategy for survival seems to be lobbying the government for protection against imports. But the writing has long been on the canyon walls here. With government policies favoring free trade and the pressures from rich countries to open up developing world markets, trying to block imports indefinitely is like opposing the onset of dawn.

Some industry observers, however, blame the demise of vegetable farming partly to the lack of coordination among the growers, who have virtually no collective power. “Farmers here have no bargaining leverage,” explains Rose Dulnuan, a Benguet native and Ph.D student doing research on the vegetable industry. “We are all small farmers here, but if we pool our supplies we can have more control over the market.” She says most of the profits are made by the traders who buy in La Trinidad and sell in Divisoria and other central markets.

	Planting vegetables is hard work, and the gains are minimal. [Howie Severino/I-Witness]

She cites erratic production schedules with creating unpredictable supplies. “It’s not market-driven. Farmers will plant one kind of vegetable just because they’re used to it. It’s bad economics and bad decision making.”

On a recent study trip to France, Dulnuan observed that farmers there were already talking about continent-wide coordination of vegetable production. In the Philippines, there has been some attempt at “market matching,” she says, so growers are producing exactly what the market demands. Farmers groups from Benguet and Mountain Province have sent delegations on visits to mall supermarkets to find out what kinds of vegetables their customers prefer. “That way,” says Dulnuan, “they don’t have to pass through trading posts and middlemen.”

But even if all 25,000 vegetable farmers in Benguet organized themselves into an effective cartel, they would still pose no match for the cheap vegetables being pushed by larger countries in the world market. Global trade talks may have been suspended, but they will eventually resume, with momentum remaining on the side of the free traders.

There is time, but it may be best used studying alternatives to the common produce supplied by growers here: The cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and other vegetables that are produced much more efficiently in places where farmers don’t have to carve fields from treacherous slopes.

We found one farmer setting an example in a small town in Benguet called Kapangan, known mainly in Baguio and elsewhere as a prime marijuana-producing area. But not only is Paulino Burcio’s main livelihood legal, it is also lucrative. On limited land, some of it in a tight ravine, Burcio has grown decorative anthuriums for both the local and foreign markets for the last two decades. He lives in a modest wooden house next to his fields, but all 14 of his children are either in college or college graduates. He started out as a plant enthusiast who saw his hobby’s potential as a niche product. His breeding expertise has even led him to develop new hybrids that he has named after his hometown and his children.

“I’m not worried about imports,” says Burcio. He has regular customers, he grows his plants with little help, and his anthuriums are known for their quality.

Other farmers have started growing organic vegetables and catering to the increasing number of health and environment-conscious consumers, including big-budget institutions like hotels. Organic vegetable production is almost impossible to achieve through the economies of scale typical of vegetable-exporting nations. Monoculture systems require vast quantities of chemical pesticides, because the lack of diversity means no natural predators to attack pests. 

Anthuriums, organic vegetables, and other specialty products catering to small but growing niches in the market may be the best hope yet for farmers dreading the coming onslaught of imports soon to be unleashed by the World Trade Organization. But it will take new and widespread know-how, and more intensive promotions to increase market interest—tasks that may be more effective means for the government to help struggling farmers than for it to dissipate its energies trying to oppose a global system only slightly less inevitable than the dawn.

In the meantime, most vegetable farmers barely getting by can’t afford to think too far ahead. Cris Guzman, for one, just wanted to complete the six-hour journey with his pregnant wife over Abortion Road to La Trinidad. They were nervous and excited about their coming firstborn. The couple did make it unscathed, and the baby was alive and kicking and eager to be born.

But their emotions were tempered by the fate of their potatoes. It rained hard on the way, the water seeped through small holes in the tarp covering their load, and the potatoes got wet and were virtually ruined. They became unsaleable. — Howie G. Severino

The author recently produced a documentary on the Benguet vegetable industry, “Habang May Gulay,” aired on I-Witness on GMA-7 last May.