“From Heat to Hate – They Have The Hurt But Not The Heart

Street protests by Filipinos against poverty is at least 100 years old. In “Appendix: A History Of The Philippine Political Protest” (officialgazette.gov.ph), the very first sentence reads: “Filipinos have been taking to the streets in protest for more than a century. Most of the first street rallies were conducted by laborers and peasants.”

That anonymously-written PH source of history goes on to say:

Street protests began to gain popularity as a method of expressing public discontent in the 1920s due to poverty in the provinces and cities. According to David Sturvenant, the Filipinization of the government did little to change the values of the landed elite. The “paradoxical character of American policy” was enlightened on paper, but insufficient in practice: despite mass education, increased literacy, public health programs, and improvements in transportation, poorly planned economic policies undid them.

The Americans ruled the Philippine islands from the 1900s to mid-1990s, politically and educationally. And so my alma mater UP Los Baños was founded in 1908 and instructed by respected American educators in the early decades, but the poverty of Filipino farmers remained. The official source cited above says “poorly planned economic policies undid them,” that is to say, American improvements in the lives of Filipinos did not improve on poverty.

Under American enlightenment, the future of Filipinos remained dark. Now that you mention it, as an alumnus educator of UP Los Baños, I am not surprised at all.

Today, I will dis/credit the American teachers who founded and ran my alma mater – innocently, they brought in chemical agriculture (CA), ah, those chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides that the whole world now knows as generators of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that are major generators of Climate Change.

And so I keep repeating in my blogposts the line that what keeps the Filipino farmers poor is their visible CA generating invisible GHGs. Think! Chemicals are expensive – Rather than chemical agriculture, farmers must practice organic agriculture.

If we help our Filipino farmers cultivate the habits of Organic Agriculture and discard their 100-year old habits of Chemical Agriculture, then:

Our farmers’ costs of farming will go down tremendously and their returns will go up much more – they will certainly grow richer. Isn’t that wonderful?!

Necessarily, our farmers will produce healthy foods that more customers would love to buy more, thus enriching their bodies while enriching the farming village starting with the farmers. Isn’t that great?!

Thus, our farmers will stop generating GHGs in their farms – thus, their farming will help stop climate change in the country or reduce it much. How much is that? Think of the millions of hectares of farms in the Philippine islands fighting climate change. Isn’t that fantastic?!

How do you end farmer poverty? Naturally.
How do you end climate change? Naturally.
How do you change Philippine history written by American hands? Using Filipino hands.

Now therefore, should we Filipinos hate the Americans? No, let us use our hearts, not our heads. We should hate the hurt and the heat and, in a loving manner, act naturally!@517