Idle farmlands on Labor Day

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO

March L. Fianza

BAGUIO CITY -- After retreating to Pangasinan for a short break from a boring city schedule, I am back and refreshed by the knee-deep seawater flowing between the Tanduyong Island and that part of Tundol in the island town of Anda.
    Seated up front on Sammy’s mini Suzuki van, I get the widest view of the moving landscape through both corners of my eyes. On both sides of the road from Alaminos to Bani, from Lingayen and Bolinao to Anda, I saw agricultural fields uncultivated and thick with wild grass.
    There are valid reasons for this sorry sight. One, harvest has just been finished and the farmers cannot prepare the soil right away because it has to be irrigated. Irrigation canals are on all sides but no water flows on them.
    This cannot be a yearly scene. At least, farmlands should be useful for eight to 10 months of the year. Or else, both farmers and consumers would keep recycling old grievances of food insufficiency.
    Another reason why farmlands stay idle is because farmer-landowners are short of finances as many of them have money for only one cropping cycle. A sad consequence is when loan sharks take advantage of the situation by lending capital on easy terms until the land ownership changes hands.    
    This is where the government and non-government can help. The easiest, simplest and most doable proposal that both congress and the executives in Malacañang can do is to rent the land from the owners and hire them as workers at the same time just to make it operational all year round.
    The circumstances require thousands of workers, therefore helping alleviate unemployment problems. More importantly, those farmlands will no longer be idle as they will surely keep producing the food we need. That could kill food importation and the criminals involved in the act.
            **
May Day or International Workers’ Day or Labor Day or whatever it is called, they are one and the same. It was started in 1889 to commemorate the Haymarket general strike of workers in Chicago on May 1, 1886 for the eight-hour workday.
    Three days later, the police dispersed a public assembly in support of the strike after an unidentified person threw a bomb.
    The police responded by firing on the workers. Seven police officers and at least four civilians were killed in the incident; 60 policemen and an unknown number of civilians were injured.
    On the same day, hundreds of strike leaders and supporters were rounded-up and four were executed by hanging. A day later, the state police in Wisconsin fired on a crowd of strikers killing seven, including a schoolboy and a man feeding chickens in his yard.
    In 1904, a labor conference attended by socialist and communist political parties and even revolutionary groups called on all Social Democratic Party organizations, trade and workers’ unions of all countries to hold street demonstrations on every first day of May for the demands of the working class and for universal peace.
    2019 in Manila, union members supported by students and the usual bystanders took to the streets on Labor Day demanding wage hikes, the implementation of the Expanded Maternity Leave Act, the junking of the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) law and calling for an end to contractualization.
    After marching to Mendiola, the groups Sentro, Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino, Federation of Free Workers, and Trade Union Congress of the Philippines were joined by the left-leaning Kilusang Mayo Uno and proceeded to a political rally in support of Labor Win candidates seeking Senate seats in the elections on May 13.
    The Labor Win coalition is composed of Bukluran ng mga Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP) head Leody de Guzman, Federation of Free Workers (FFW) president Sonny Matula, Kilusang Mayo Uno founder Ernesto Arellano, labor lawyer Allan Montaño and former Bayan Muna representative Neri Colmenares.
    With the workers’ votes, will any of the Labor Win political bets win?
    A big percentage of the Filipino population equivalent to 41 million Filipinos are composed of workers, enough to catapult any of them to the senate or presidency.
    But, despite the backing of workers’ groups, senate bet De Guzman admitted that based on their estimates, active union members who would vote for senate bets are only around 4% of the number of employed Filipinos, or about 1.3 million.
    Furthermore, workers and sympathy votes are not enough and street rallies sometimes give negative results.     They need resources to mount a nationwide campaign.
    Pre-election surveys also told us that none of the candidates landed in the Magic 12. This was due to the fact that even experts talk about a “dim chance” of winning because of “weak and non-existent” workers’ vote.
    This means, evenwhile the senatoriables and their supporters rally for pro-worker policies, they still have to find a convincing reason why they should be elected; unless the truth is that they do not want to win.
    Common sense should tell them that burning effigies and attacking government personalities have never been rewarding campaign strategies. These actions drive away voters. Dirty campaigning does not gather votes.