Last august 11, 2008 I visited Baggao, a remote eastern municipality of Cagayan near the pacific coast. It is adjacent to the vicinity of the famous Port Irene where many imported cars are available. The purpose of my trip is to visit an Igorot relative at the same time an opportunity to see the place. Baggao is a farming community with rice and corn as their primary product for home consumption and to supply the market too. The people augment their income by raising domesticated animals in their backyards, they complain that fertilizer and labor is very expensive. The farmers borrow money to finance the farm but after the harvest almost all the product goes to the creditor. They are lucky if there were no typhoons otherwise these farmers will be more debt ridden. Middlemen buy the grains at very low price too so that the margin of profit for the laboring farmer is very small. Some got frustrated and left their land and found odd jobs other than farming, they contend that at least they are receiving wages every week, unlike the farm where they harvest once a year while it is under the mercy of nature. Visibly there are no factories to process their products they are transported to Isabela or Manila for processing and packaging.
Long stretches of dirt roads with few patches of cemented ones inter connect the different barangays. Bridges are unreliable as many cannot withstand the rising of the strong current during the rainy seasons. The Barangay folks claim that the infrastructure like the bridges and the road network should have been well done and finished long time ago but because of the slow pace of construction and the corruption of the projects made the work substandard. They claim that equipments are brought to the project site but will just stay there for long periods without accomplishing much.
I observed many communication towers owned by the telecom giants of the Philippine like globe and smart companies are everywhere but most of them are for text and calling use only, I tried to access the internet using my cell phone but I get a response telling me that the service is not available.
The government rely on the advertisement of these companies that every place in the Philippines is inter connected to the world via internet is a bombastic claim with empty results. The Government totally believes the claims of these companies without counter checking if they are telling the truth or not.
These few observations with some personal interviews are just a tip of the iceberg. Many projects are not actually helping the people of the community but for the benefit of the meddling politicians and their dummies.
It is timely for the local residents to take the initiatives to submit petitions and urge the leaders of the province to look for the interest of the locals. These officials should be coached to submit these petitions and resolutions to the national office for the record. The congressman will follow it up in the legislature and work it out because that is the reason he was voted for.Let our demands be heard by making noise to the over centralized government in a peaceful way.
