Where enterprise feeds hunger

"Crunch Time," The Evening Paper

Issue of 22 May 1996

It is one thing to talk about kudzu in America's fertile south as an example of the spirit of enterprise, it is another thing altogether to watch the macrocosm of hunger in the world's poorest continent--and not know how to alleviate it.

Yet, the bottom line is the same. Between homemade bottles of jam and jelly from an excess of vegetation in a rich and blessed land and genetic variants grown on dry and arid land (or no land at all), there is a common impetus.

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Behind the contemporary race to fill the food bowls of Africa, where hunger has historically outrun the land's ability to feed people, are the tools of technology.

In a continent where traditional methods of farming no longer work, where nutrients get sucked out and pests spread faster than plants, the Nigeria-based International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) now boasts of having saved from extinction one of Africa's most important food crops--cassava--by releasing insects to biologically control pests and implementing selective breeding to improve yields.

The institute has now set its sights on cowpea, a legume that provides as much as 25 percent of protein in arid parts of Africa. In secure freezers inside the institute, more than 15,000 varieties of cowpea seeds are stored. Scientists work to insert insect-resistant genes from wild cowpeas in cultivated varieties.

Only in the past four months has IITA obtained a transgenic plant with reporter genes that work against the insects. The next step is to use the genes to transform the plant. Even then, it will still take three to four years of laboratory work before the institute can have a sturdy cowpea strain growing in the open.

And it will need private industry and the help of NGOs before the institute's cowpea can find growing space in the fields of hungry, malnourished Africa.

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When you look at another aspect, Singapore is in a worse situation than Africa, which has the land, if not the money.

However, one Singaporean, Lee Sing Kong, is proving to have technology--"not high-tech or low-tech ... rather the right tech."

Lee's technology is aeroponics, which has already been tried in the United States and Israel. This science of growing plants without soil seems best suited to Singapore, which imports its water and most of its vegetables, growing locally only 10 percent of its vegetable supply.

Lee has been experimenting with aeroponics for the past five years, and he is now reaping fresh crops from his experiment: high-yield, high-value temperate and subtropical crops such as lettuces, capsicums, tomatoes, and asparagus, grown in Singapore's tropical climate, "at reasonable cost," in greenhouses without air-conditioning or special lighting.

The plants are placed in troughs made of polystyrene foam with their roots beneath an insulating cover. As described by Reuters' Abdul Jalil Hamid, nutrients are supplied to the roots in the troughs in mist form through a pump activated by a light sensor.

How long does it take a plant to grow? "We grow them faster down here. In the temperate climate, the crop cycle for iceberg lettuce from seed to harvest is 100 days. On this system, it takes me 45 to 50 days.

"In the past, when you talked about growing temperate plants in tropical countries, you were talking about creating a temperate house. An aeroponic system is practical because ... we don't need to cool the area environment. All we need to do is to modify the root zone, modify the environment within the trough itself. When you insulate your trough, the heat gain is much lower. That's why it makes the system cost-effective. Furthermore, you can grow 365 days a year," Lee explained.

Lee is now experimenting with growing strawberries and herbs aeroponically.

******

Others with arid land, or no land at all, are finding ways around their disadvantages. Filipinos let their comparative advantage wither away from disregard for technology and, worse, lack of enterprise.

-- NBT

Exporting a professional workforce

After the case of Flor Contemplacion provoked widespread national indignation, it became necessary to rethink the issue of OFWs and their endless tragedy. Having worked in a multinational corporation and with firsthand knowledge of the almost obsessive professionalism expected of Filipinos employed by such companies, I am convinced that only that level of professionalism and hard work, efficiency and performance, imported into the operations of a private Filipino head-hunting company, can provide hope and the promise of a brighter future for exploited OFWs.

But first, the Philippine government will have to accept the reality that government agencies are too indifferent and government employees too occupied--and both of them, too unprofessional--to succeed in the work.

____________________

Editorial Page column, The Evening Paper

Issue of 21 March 1995

I doubt if there is any region in the world where you will not find Filipino manpower, whether skilled or unskilled, white- or blue-collar, in households, offices, factories, ships, cocktail lounges or bars, running machines of one kind or another and earning compensation for the work they do.

In that sense, domestic helpers in Singapore are no different from expat executives in New York. They are, in the jargon of global trade, the raw materials of our growing service industry.

Eventually, one is bound to ask: Can we not run this industry the way all export ventures should be run, constantly upgrading its products and cultivating its acknowledged competitive edge?

The question is not a cold, unfeeling, heartless one. If anything, the case of Flor Contemplacion--and those of all other abused, maltreated, imprisoned Filipino OFWs all over the world--underscores as nothing else does the need to professionalize this service industry.

We may argue that it is government's job to take care of the Filipino workers it sends abroad. But will such an argument improve their situation any faster or earlier?

Will it not be better all around to admit, once and for all, that government is ill-equipped to handle such a large and extensive industry? Besides, are we willing to put our faith in another government superbody to handle our OFWs exclusively? The skeptics and cynics among us will no doubt raise their eyebrows at one more government agency, one more opportunity for bureaucrats and paper-pushers to siphon off precious public funds into private pockets.

So, how do we protect our OFWs and maximize the benefits from the thriving export of Filipino manpower?

I would like to see the industry professionalized and Filipino workers upgraded so that they begin to consider foreign employment not as a stopgap measure, a quick fix that will solve their families' temporary and immediate cash problems, but as a long-term career (if they so wish) that can offer them self-respect, professional dignity, and prospects of advancement.

This goal requires that we seek a unique niche for Filipino labor in the global marketplace, something that should not be too difficult to do.

The only other countries exporting their manpower to other parts of the world, across all job segments and in considerable numbers, are Third World countries in Asia such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Indian expatriates may also be found in many places, but the diaspora is not enshrined as a government policy. At least, not in the way we glorify our own OFWs. Besides, Indian overseas workers are, head-to-head, better educated than our own.

Now, how do we carve out a higher niche for our OFWs?

First, place the whole industry--from recruiting to training to processing to handling to monitoring to plotting out a future career for each worker--in the hands of professional managers. Declare the industry off limits totally to government bureaucrats and civil servants. The export of manpower should be managed by a completely professional, privately managed but publicly listed corporation. Its operations should be run by corporate people who know the global marketplace, are experts in the management of exports, and able to keep government's dirty hands out of the business.

Next, do not send out OFWs unless they have gone through superlative training and orientation in a special school recognized by client states (I would suggest, with diplomas to boot!), not only in the jobs they will perform, but also in the laws, language, culture, religion, and values of the countries where they will work. They should know by heart what to do in case of emergencies or when problems occur.

Further, service contracts should be minutely reviewed by the corporation's legal department to protect the OFWs and ensure that their contracts cannot be violated or changed at their employers' whims.

Perhaps more important than anything else, however, there should be--in every post where the company sends Filipino workers--corporate handlers and/or country managers (baby-sitters, if you will). Their telephone numbers and addresses should be in the wallet of every Filipino worker in every country. These handlers/managers should be completely familiar with the laws of their host country, should possess high-level contacts in the governments and media of these countries, and should be available to workers at all times. They should also know every Filipino worker in their posting, should meet with them regularly, and should know their situation.

Finally, the corporation should be dedicated to the full and continuous upgrading of the workers it sends abroad. After a Filipino worker successfully finishes his contract and he decides he wants to continue working overseas, the company should immediately plot a career path for him to train and prepare him for the next higher position that he can, or wants to, fill.

Only when the industry has been restructured toward this vertical direction can the Filipino migrant worker hope to find dignity in his situation and a promise in his future.

-- NBT

When even weeping is not enough

Filipino OFWs continue to die in many countries all over the world. Some die in tragically unjust, even criminal, circumstances. Others become the victims of their own inability to adjust to, foresee, and follow the cultural and religious traditions of their host countries. Still others find that a job abroad does not necessarily free them from the smallness that had characterized their lives and values in the past.

This was written in connection with the case of Flor Contemplacion, who was meted the death penalty in Singapore over the killing of her friend, Delia Maga, another Filipina domestic helper. It may as well have been written today.

____________________

Editorial, The Evening Paper

Issue of 8 March 1995

It may be that in our little world, tragedies like those of Flor Contemplacion, the Filipina domestic helper who meets her appointment with fate on March 17 in Singapore, are ships that pass in the night--briefly known, publicly regretted, swiftly forgotten.

In the comfort of our private moments, as we read about her in the newspapers, we probably sigh with gratitude and whisper, "There, but for the grace of God, go I..." We may even offer a tear for the woman who could never have foreseen, even had she the most vivid of imaginations, the infinity she now contemplates.

The Christians among us will no doubt pray for her soul, for that alone seems to be her remaining salvation. But who among us would dare ask if we, individually or collectively, contributed to the burden of the cross that now weighs heavily on the shoulders of this simple Filipina caught without any more defenses, awaiting the end of her life in a strange land among strange people?

There can be no doubt that Flor Contemplacion and all the others who had gone her route before--domestic helpers in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Middle East; entertainers in Japan; construction workers in Saudi Arabia or merchant sailors on the high seas--left their native land with only one thought in mind: to earn a little more than the pittance they would have received in Manila's factories or the starvation they would have faced in the countryside.

Flor actually went in search of her fate the legal way. No domestic helper gets into Singapore without going through a legal sieve and coming out with very clean papers.

The state that was sending her out gave her its blessings; the state that was taking her in found her satisfactory. Both found her papers and persona in order. Does it not fall on the shoulders of both to discuss, explain, demand, negotiate, argue, debate the case of Flor Contemplacion the human being, not just Flor Contemplacion the statistic on an OFW file?

At some point, while Flor carried out her duty of servitude, it was clear something happened. Doubts are now being openly cast on her sanity, her health, her guilt--or all of them.

We do not know the real circumstances surrounding the fateful event that brought her whole world to collapse.

We do know, however, that more tragedies like those of Flor Contemplacion will haunt us unless we all do something to help prevent them.

The government must stop playing up overseas workers as the "new heroes"; they are actually the new victims in a trade as old as humanity. The government must make it more attractive for Filipino workers, especially the unskilled--the more easily victimized ones--to stay in the Philippines by spreading the benefits of foreign and local investments more equitably throughout the country. Filipinos already working overseas must be able to count on the strong support system that should be available from Filipino diplomatic staffers assigned to our embassies abroad, from the Department of Foreign Affairs, and from the President if needed.

As for each one of us, let us not end this episode by briefly weeping for a countrywoman like Flor Contemplacion. Let us look into ourselves and ask ourselves very honestly whether we, too, have contributed unthinkingly to the tragedy of Flor Contemplacion and others like her.

In our travels abroad, did we ever meet other Flors but turned our backs on them because they were "only" domestic helpers? Did we swiftly look elsewhere when we met fellow Filipinos, and thereby lost the chance to send a greeting that could have warmed their hearts, answered their prayers, and convinced them that God continues to look after them?

Here at home, there are programs and organizations that can be established to assist our countrymen before they even make the fateful decision to leave for jobs abroad. Rallies to protest death sentences in Singapore and funds to assist maltreated Filipino workers in the Middle East are all well and good. But what we need are humanitarian acts and organizations dedicated to helping Filipino migrant workers before the fact, not after.

As for all of us, perhaps all that is necessary is for us to extend the hand of friendship, assistance, concern to everybody, whether we know them personally or not. You never know what even just a kind word or look, extended to a stranger, can do to change the meaning of life for those who have very little of it to look forward to.

-- NBT

One year before Time: Carbon offsets

Editorial page column, The Evening Paper

Issue of 26 October 1995

A whole year before Time magazine picked up the trend, we in trade journalism already had a growing inkling of how the tradeoff worked, thanks to an international network of industry-focused writers working at ground level to document swiftly changing currents in global trade.

So it was actually in March 1994 that we learned how industrialists and environmentalists were coming together in a shotgun marriage now known internationally as "carbon offsets."

But let me tell you the story from my desk then as editor of one of the internationally circulated trade magazines of a multinational publishing group.

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The special assignment had gone to our Chicago bureau, which coordinated Latin American coverage for all group publications. We had asked for a straightforward spotlight on the Brazil fashion industry. In that sense, it was supposed to be a cut-and-dried trade story.

That is, except for one sentence in the report on one company--a vertically integrated garment manufacturer, with more than 17,000 workers, that has pioneered in residue-free shorts and undershirts woven from its own organically grown cotton and produced with the least environmental impact: dyes from roots and herbs, reduced noise pollution in mills, an intensive industrial sewage-treatment program.

Targeting the picky and meticulous European market and with German technological push, the family-owned Brazilian company had initiated its own voluntary carbon-offset commitment. "It preserves 17 square meters of Atlantic coastal rainforest for every constructed square meter the company owns," was how our Brazil writer described the program.

Following up on this tip took my research all around the Southern hemisphere countries, including Paraguay, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador. Time magazine reporters in April 1995 would add to the practice of carbon offsets such Asian converts as Malaysia and Indonesia.

But the very first Latin American country to sign up for carbon-offset agreements with US utility firms was Costa Rica.

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In 1994, ecotourism overtook bananas as Costa Rica's main source of foreign exchange. In the next three years, the Costa Rican government would earn anywhere from $600 million to $1 billion in revenues from ecotourism. Before the year 1995 was over, a total of 800,000 tourists would spend their precious dollars in Costa Rica's 28 parks and reserves spread over active volcanoes, cloud forests, tropical parks, and palm-lined beaches.

By its decision to devote one quarter of its national territory to protected biosphere and wildlife reserves, Costa Rica would show the whole world that conserving the country's natural resources could be not only a sustainable but even a more lucrative option to destroying its forests.

So successful has the ecotourism approach been that many local landowners, wanting to share in the largesse, would soon allow their forest lands to grow again in areas that, for decades, had been denuded by logging and agriculture.

At a Pacific Coast rainforest, a Reuters reporter described groups of squirrel monkeys, once near extinction, swinging across the paths of tourists, howler monkeys growling from treetops, capuchin monkeys begging for nuts by the beach, and giant iguanas lying motionless for the tourists' cameras. He saw scarlet macaws, toucans, elusive coatis, resplendent quetzal birds, leather-back turtles, red-eyed leap frogs, and poisonous dart frogs moving around, their routines undisturbed by the tourists.

The whole effort has been a determined preservation of the unique isthmus ecosystem native to the geography and topography of the country. In exchange, the country has won plaudits, even from the most critical and exacting environmentalists.

"Costa Rica has shown that ecotourism is not only competitive with more destructive land uses but can, in fact, be a greater generator of foreign exchange," testified the president of Conservation International, a Washington-based environmental organization.

Aside from carbon-offset programs with US utility firms, the Costa Rican government also pioneered in biodiversity conservation by signing the first bioprospecting tie-up with pharmaceutical giant Merck and Co., which will provide local laboratories with investment and technology for the successful screening of biological compounds.

The presence of tourists has not always been beneficial to Costa Rica's rainforests and reserves. Park managements have now banned camping and limited visitors to 800 a day to reduce their impact on the park's privileged residents--the animals and birds. Of course, entrance fees were also raised tenfold to make up for any income shortfalls.

Urban development is also being monitored closely. While all kinds of hotels, restaurants, bars, and honky-tonks have sprung up, the government is using gentle persuasion on capitalists to make sure they go by one model: studio apartments which, during construction, necessitate the felling of only one tree. Even now, the smell of guavas is said to pervade the grounds around apartments situated in forests, which are still home to sloths, monkeys, iguanas, snakes, and butterflies.

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It was well after the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit that carbon offsets took off. The consensus was reached then that the buildup of carbon-based gases spewed by industry into the atmosphere was turning the planet into a giant greenhouse. The 155 countries at that summit pledged to reduce carbon-gas emissions to 1990 levels by year 2000. The question was: How?

Governments could either crack down on their industries and force them to install high-efficiency machinery, a time-consuming and expensive process. Or, they could opt for the drastic and unacceptable, which is to curb economic growth.

Tradeoff ideas such as international carbon offsets immediately allow "smokestack countries" like the United States to get credits for helping preserve rainforests in, say, Borneo, Cambodia, or Bolivia.

One US utility firm went about its program the whole way, with enthusiasm and verve. It introduced environmentally friendly logging techniques to its partner, a Malaysian timber products company, to reduce unintentional damage, promoted tree replanting and regrowth, monitored the progress of the partnership, and measured the reductions in carbon dioxide emissions on site.

When the accountants took over, their figures proved beyond doubt that the US utility company saved more, with no reduction in efficiency and capacity, with its carbon-offset program half a world away.

Perhaps they will work just as well, if not better, when implemented within a country.

-- NBT

Today's growth stories

"Crunch Time," The Evening Paper

Issue of 13 March 1996

The Philippines has fallen way behind its neighbors in science and technology, and those neighbors are all crowing about it. How anchor our claim to sustainable economic growth when all others around us are overwhelming us with their corps of scientists, technologists, researchers, and technicians? This, I told myself, was a good enough subject for a column.

And it would have been--the subject of this column, that is--had I not heard again on the radio, on my way to the office, another tale of wifely woe: another Filipina, her regional accent very audible, begging a husband in Saudi Arabia for what he sounded quite unwilling to provide before he comes home later in the year.

What price all those days we set aside every year to honor Filipino women if a great number of them allow themselves to be reduced to such an insulting state of total and abject dependence on others?

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Adelma Grenier Simmons has inspired the planting of thousands of herb gardens across the United States. Founder of the 23.5-hectare Caprilands Herb Farm, she conducts lectures that are often booked solid. She has written more than 48 books on herbal gardening, herbal folklore, and the use of herbs in cooking and decorating.

Simmons walks with a stick and declines to disclose her age, but neighbors remember she first came to a neglected and rundown Connecticut farm as a young woman in 1929.

Over the years, she has painstakingly transformed the property. She began by planting one small herb plot, laying the stone walks with her bare hands.

Now, says Reuters correspondent Jacqueline Weaver, visitors to Caprilands will find 34 gardens and period or reproduction buildings all over the property. A productive afternoon visit to the farm would include a walk about the gardens, bookstore, greenhouse, and gift shop, followed by a daily lecture on herb gardening and a meal in Simmons' 18th-century home.

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Bounlap Nhouyvanisvong is vice president of the Lao Association of Coffee Exporters. "By the year 2000, we expect to export at least 15,000 tons of coffee," he told a Reuters correspondent visiting the Bolaven Plateau in southern Laos.

The association wants to expand the current 26,000 hectares of coffee plantations and rehabilitate old bushes, some of which were planted by French colonialists as far back as the 1930s. With new plantations, the target is to achieve a yield double the current 600 kilograms per hectare.

ACE was formed last July with the aim of boosting exports. Since 1991, French and Australian agronomists have been helping the association set up a coffee research and development center in the highlands under a World Bank-funded program.

Nhouyvanisvong is convinced Laotian coffee output will someday match that of neighboring Vietnam, which has a booming coffee industry with at least a 200,000-ton harvest in the 1995-96 season.

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Poverty is not exclusive to the Philippine milieu, but somewhere in life's circuitous routes, could some of our women--and men, too--have lost their initiative and imagination? Sometimes, the processes of urban migration and overseas employment render many of our people helpless and dependent, divesting them of some of our ancestors' known virtues. Like hard work, resourcefulness, ambition.

Today's growth stories, whether we like it or not, are being written by people who are willing to work. Hard. With both hands and minds. In their own countries.

-- NBT

That time of year

"The Person That I Am" (column)
Expressweek (weekly magazine of The Daily Express)
late 1970s, exact issue date unconfirmed

Who was it who wrote once that the veneer of life was getting thinner? On a hot day after the storms, tempers flare over traffic jams, bad roads, inefficient systems, closed bridges. The heat is on, somebody says, and he doesn't mean just literally.

One letter we received not too long ago, about a comment we made on a certain performance on television, accused us of being "controlled." This "concerned mother," in beautiful handwriting, in almost flawless English, on a piece of immaculate white stationery, wrote me that it was the last time she would let her children be exposed to controlled journalism through the magazine for which we wrote the piece. Or any magazine. She talked about control with such a closed, cold mind I almost heard the imperceptible dropping of a bomb before it goes off. I wonder what she would say to her children about the violence of "independent" spirits and the "bravery" of people who cannot affix their signatures to their letters.

But I can imagine that violence has become a regular thing these days. We see so much of it on television, and except in the most extreme of cases, violence on television hardly moves us anymore. We suppose that, as audiences everywhere get more and more inured, producers sitting down in the safe and air-conditioned offices of US networks will have to think of more and more ways to attract and sensationalize. It is all a part of their business. So, perhaps, whoever said the veneer of life is getting thinner should also have said that man's hide is getting thicker.

But it is true: there is something to be said about how little violence--real violence, not just TV violence--affects us these days. Ten years ago, Vietnam was "a purgatory, an agony, a bloody hell." Men died, though they may never have set foot on the muddy earth of a Vietnamese kampong, for the right to castigate world leaders over what they had done to Indochina. Even earlier, men and women cried over the useless deaths--of the two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Pope John XXIII--even though they had never seen these men, much less known them.

Now, it is different. Wars are going on everywhere and people are still dying uselessly in Asia, in Africa, everywhere. But very few within the ages of 15-25 seem to care. Most of them are turned on to the artificial violence on television, to the fantasy life created by the US networks. During our time, we probably cared too much. We cried over fires and deaths, worried about floods, got goose pimples over accidents and the death of a pope.

These days, what seems to concern many is whether the Red Brigades will storm a papal burial and teach the world a lesson or two about passion and dedication. Five thousand soldiers had to stand guard against Italy's terrorist groups while the body of Pope Paul VI went through a week of public viewing. And if we are to believe a weekly newsmagazine, the papal conclave that followed had to guard against being bugged.

Irreverent as we are, we find that precaution a little funny. But then, Pope Paul VI, who added that directive to the rules governing a papal conclave, was probably right. There's been too much technical interference around. All those machines are beginning to drown human voices.

Every day in the house, the maids turn on the radio, morning to night, listening to weird and endless soaps. When the children come in from school, they turn to either the stereo or the television. We can hardly hear each other in all the din.

Unfortunately, there's something we hear instead, loud and clear, the way we feel the heat coming on slowly while we cross a closed bridge on foot. A young man at Princeton University was cited for his paper on how to make an atomic bomb. It is, he says, not too difficult to do. That one little piece of news on a morning paper has set many people thinking.

Here's more: a US congressional advisory group called the Nuclear Proliferation and Safeguard Advisory Panel has released the results of one year of hard work. Its 522-page report says it is all so much later than we idealists think. Very soon, some truly violent and sophisticated group can put a bomb together.

This mythical group, probably a dozen well-trained and very experienced people, with adequate knowledge of science and engineering, supported by scientific, technical, and organizational infrastructure, can buy fissionable material on the blackmarket, or steal it. If they execute the process properly, they can have a militarily effective nuclear explosive ready within two years.

Now, you can understand why some people say the heat is on. With six nations possessing the bomb, two dozens more with the economic and technical capability to produce it, and all others wanting anything and everything connected with it, it thus seem so much easier to get a bomb. And both conservatives and liberals are equally afraid of it.

Certainly, every time the terrorists call in with their demands after a kidnapping, some people's hearts must jump. What if the terrorists have put together a bomb, however primitive? Even a Molotov can harm. The bomb started in 1945, supposedly to end a world war. These days, it can start a new one. The technical means used more than three decades ago to end a world crisis can ignite a new one today.

But we are talking about some far-off possibility, some of the elders suggest, a thing too far removed from our lives. On a September day, our thoughts should not stray too far away from traffic jams and bad roads and closed bridges. But that our thoughts can span the gap may be a sad reflection on us, rather than on the human race.

Or perhaps it is just that time of year.

-- NBT