Melo Bautista

“If rice mills refuse to pay us for what our crops are worth, how can we sustain as small farmers?”

To begin the series of "Giving a Voice to Farmers", I will introduce Melo Bautista, a 45 years old farmer from Isabela, Philippines. Melo’s journey as a farmer began when she married her husband at the age of twenty-one. Ever since then, Melo works on the one-hectare rice paddy field owned by her husband. Over the summer, Melo agreed to do a Zoom interview with me and we spent hours chatting about her experiences and struggles as a small farmer.

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“As farmers, we live a busy and tiring life. Our day starts before the sun rises and ends when the sun sets. At 4 am, when the sky is still pitch black, I wake up to the loud screeching of our chickens that signals a new day on the farm. I brush my teeth, prepare breakfast for my children and put on my work clothes. Around 5 am, I head towards the rice fields and plow the grass. During the fallow period, I prepare the land by leveling the fields and sowing the seeds to ensure that the rice thrives and receives all the nourishment it needs. Once all the seeds are planted, I spray pesticide to avoid pests destroying the plants. As days pass by, I visit the rice fields daily to solve problems that growing plants experience. For example, while the crops are still young, I apply fertilizers twice to ensure a successful harvest.

Every year, we experience two harvest seasons. While the main crop season (the dry months of March to August) yields most harvest, we aren’t always as lucky during the second crop harvest (wet, bare months of September to December). Located near the ocean, the Philippines often experiences strong typhoons in the second crop season, resulting in a lesser harvest. When typhoons hit the rice fields, I cannot even save a single sack of rice. Though some typhoons may not affect crops, the combination of strong typhoons and rain significantly damages crops, causing all the rice plants to fall and stick onto the soil. Despite spending lots of money to sustain the needs of rice lands, we can lose months of hard labor in seconds as the typhoons wipe away all of our harvests. In addition, many suffer from poverty brought by rain and typhoons; many die from famine, lack of shelter and scarcity of clean drinking water.

Since our farm is only one hectare, our main priority is to grow our own crops. We harvest around 100-120 sacks full of wheat during the main crop seasons and save 20-25 sacks for ourselves. However, during the wet seasons, we have much less harvest. Thus, if we don’t reach 100 sacks of grain, we won’t sell to save the produce as our primary food source for that season.

"The main problem for us is that while farming equipment and fertilizers are extremely expensive, the selling price for rice from buying stations remains very low."

As smallholder farmers, we don’t export our produce; instead, we sell the remainder of our crops to big rice mills. Each buying station holds a different buying price for the grains we grow: some pay more while others pay less. Thus, we visit every buying station and negotiate to find the highest selling price for our crops. However, the agricultural cycle of transporting crops to the hands of consumers relies on middlemen like rice mills. The mills make a significant profit by selling our produce to bigger factories, which then export the crops to markets and other corporations.

Most of the time, stations only pay around 12-15 pesos for 1kg of rice. Nonetheless, grocery stores sell the equivalent amount of rice for 40-45 pesos. Thus, the main priorities of small farms are to save their own harvests as it is too expensive to buy from big corporations. The history of receiving low prices for grains has persisted for extended amounts of time, and we fear that our problem will never receive proper remedies. We farmers are hungry for higher prices for our crops; anything above 20-30 pesos will satisfy us. The costs of expensive fertilizers and pesticides and the low selling price of crops result in menial profits after each harvesting season. As of now, the only solution to our problem is if the government intervenes and forces the rice mills to pay us for what our crops are worth.”