Events: The Video Documentary PUREZA: Preparation or Propaganda? (5)
The former SRA Administrator Wilson Gamboa, Sr. wrote about a symbol back in the early 90s to picture how the sugar industry would score upon the onslaught of globalization under the terms of GATT-WTO-AFTA and the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). He pictured globalization as a hammer and CARP as the sickle that will smash and slash the industry if stakeholders will not be reasonable enough to draw opportunities through production efficiency. His words were unheeded.
Gamboa, Sr.’s hammer and sickle was given much attention in PUREZA as enemies but understandably, the social-strategic analyses, plans and courses of actions to “fight back” is up to us. Globalization and CARP are “givens”. Do we have the powers to repeal CARP? Are we ready to isolate ourselves from the sweep of globalization?
One of Gamboa, Sr.’s writings read, the industry must accept that globalization and CARP are “two irreversibles”. We lost privileges to the U.S. market when the Laurel-Langley Agreement was terminated in 1974. The Negrense sugar industry, he said, could have gone into serious thinking, adjustments and retooling to seek other market niches and gear for global competition. IT DID NOT. It sulked even more with the implementation of CARP. There were no “economic inventions and interventions” to use Land Reform for economies of scales. The sugar planters never gave in to the idea that “there can be land reform without land fragmentation and did not even bother to strategize towards corporate farming and cooperativism.
Gamboa, Sr. was an anathema of then President Corazon C. Aquino’s declaration of the sugar industry as a “Sunset Industry”. It is a “Sunshine Industry” according to him “with domestic consumption growing cumulatively at about four percent (4%) annually and the world’s attention in the coming 21st century will shift to the Asia-Pacific countries.”
There is no uncertainty in the industry, Gamboa Sr., believes, “for as long as its direction must go - towards productivity and efficiency, lest it continues to be a drag to the national economy.” Like a voice in the wilderness, indeed came a time when the ASEAN countries caught the sweep of change and caught up with the Asian Dragons – all except the Philippines.
The poor state of land taxation collection allegedly because of CARP is not the enemy but a signal for LGUs to shape up or perish. I do not have the means to make a study of this but who among the LGUs invented a sound fiscal policy that will turn the so-called “evils of CARP” to its advantage? Media coverages can be avenues but this institution, too, is beset by its parochial concerns. I have no space for discussions of two other institutions, the churches and schools, but which could have been avenues for serious discussions of transforming Land Reform to a release of energies that shall uplift us from backward agricultural economy to a newly industrialized country…”, the science of efficiency, if I may add.
The alleged havoc created by CARP stuck with us, will be with us and none of us took the pathways of the sciences to quantify the vast universe of the Island’s competitive advantage in world trade.*
