STRAIGHT FROM THE BIG CITY

Winning globalization locally
Ike Seneres

Globalization is an economic war that should be fought on two fronts, one locally, and the other internationally. As we know it already, we are not winning the war in the international front, because of the weakness of our products, and because of the lack of a cohesive program that would promote our products and services more aggressively. When sales are down, companies would blame either the product or the marketing for the failure, but in the case of our export sales, it seems that both are to blame.
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Normally we should say that we should stop while we are ahead, but knowing that we are not ahead, we should instead say that we should try to move ahead in the global game where we can do something right away within our means, and right now, that seems to be the local front. Complex as globalization may be, it could actually be explained using simple mathematics, given the fact that if we could not increase our export sales yet, we should at least decrease our import costs.
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Food and energy are two of our biggest national costs, and simple logic would tell us that if we could just produce more of these resources locally, we would have won a major battle in the global economic war. Believe it or not, the key to winning this battle could be integrated farming, using an approach that would produce both food and energy at the same time. I am not saying that we should now pin our hopes on agriculture; all I am saying is that we should try to win and be productive where we can, while we are still posturing to become more competitive in the industrial and service sectors.
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Corn, soy, sugar cane, coconut, cassava and even the lowly sweet potato are just some of the crops that could give us food and energy at the same time. In this short list, corn and soy have the most productivity potential and have the most multiplier effects, because these are used as feed ingredients, very critical resource that are in turn used to produce other food products such as pork, poultry, beef and fish. It is really just a matter of supply and demand, because if there is a surplus in these two commodities, we could just turn them into energy sources as well, knowing that alcohol is already a proven source of fuel.
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Despite what the government says, there is actually a big shortage of yellow corn, with or without a heat wave. If indeed there is a surplus of yellow corn, there would be no need to import it, and our local feeds would then be made mostly of local inputs. And if there is really a surplus, we should know right away, because the prices of meat and fish products would immediately drop as well. Reducing the price of food items is actually a direct way of reducing poverty, because if more people could afford to buy food, more people would fall below the poverty threshold.
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Hands down, we could say that our local meat and fish products are not globally competitive, also because of simple mathematics, given the fact that our farm production inputs right now are too high, thus making our sales margins too low. It is for this reason why imported meat and fish products are winning the global game right here in our home market, coming in either as duty paid or smuggled merchandize. Given this reality, there is no other way to change the equation but to lower the inputs, and this is now possible by shifting to organic farming, an alternative that is now economically viable, thanks to some homegrown technologies.
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Organic farming and integrated farming are two separate agricultural approaches, but these two could actually be combined to maximize their joint strengths. It is actually possible to go into integrated farming without going organic, but tests now show that it is also possible to completely shift to integrated farming systems a 100%, with better yields compared to using chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides.
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Starting this month, we are going to offer free seminars about integrated farming systems at our Guadalupe office. The topics will include urban agriculture, piggery, poultry, fish farming and feeds making, among others. We are going to teach people how to grow their own feed ingredients and mix them on their own, so that they could lower their farm input costs. We are going to teach them also how to make their own organic fertilizers. Of course, we are going to encourage people to grow corn and soy for human consumption, for feed ingredients and for energy conversion.
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