Tying down poverty in Cebu with abaca

Tying down poverty in Cebu with abaca

Manila Bulletin
27 May 2008

Barangay Magsaysay in the Cebu Hillylands was named after President Ramon Magsaysay after the plane crash that killed the late president happened near this upland village.

Another disaster, but more silent and sinister, also struck this village a long time ago and affected the lives of over a hundred households here: poverty. The remoteness of this barangay, plus the non-existence of any significant income-generating activity beyond sustenance farming, has forced families to eke out a meager existence in these hills.

A Community’s Answer to Poverty

In 2005, their plight came to the attention of PBSP or Philippine Business for Social Progress, the country’s largest corporate-led social development coalition, which has been implementing its ARM, or Area Resource Management, program in the buffer zones of Cebu’s three major watersheds. The Cebu Hillyland ARM is a large-scale, long-term, integrated poverty reduction strategy which aims for the protection and rehabilitation of the watersheds while providing livelihood, organizational development, and poverty-reduction programs for marginalized communities in the uplands.

PBSP began by sending their community organizers, project officers, and technical staff to Barangay Magsaysay to ask the residents if they would be willing to participate in PBSP’s ARM program. This would entail the villagers’ commitment to allow themselves to be organized into a cooperative; to elect and follow their leaders; and attend the various training sessions on livelihood, financial management, marketing and production, cooperative building--even health and hygiene.

As the training and organizational sessions were being conducted, the villagers identified abaca as the crop they wanted to propagate in their area, because not only was the soil and climate suitable for its propagation, there were also abaca buyers supplying Cebu’s SMEs and exporters who were willing to go all the way up to the hillylands to buy whatever abaca products they could produce. There was a ready market for abaca and the demand was growing.

Today, the Barangay Unity Key to Integrated Development-Multi-Purpose Cooperative (BUKID MPC) have planted more than 100 upland hectares to abaca. 30 hectares are coop-managed and the rest belong to individual planters or coop members. A hectare planted to abaca can net around P 250,000 a year for one person. Because of this, the coop is expanding the program and they are now targetting to reach 200 hectares planted to abaca in 5 years. Aside from abaca, they have also diversified their crops, with some doing contour farming of pineapples, carrots, lettuce, brocolli, and other high value crops. Some have even gone into dairy farming and have started to produce fresh milk. All this was with encouragement plus technical and financial assistance from PBSP.

For Barangay Magsaysay, poverty has turned into prosperity in only five years. Considering the speed at which they have succeeded, it won’t be long before these hard-working Cebuanos will be the models for other barangays to emulate.