By Leonardo Micua

 

FROM where I sit, I view the incident in Bayambang where a woman onion farmer, who testified in the senate hearing and cried harassment when the police visited her not once but eight times, as an eye-opener .

From what I gathered, the issue started when DILG Secretary Ben Hur Abalos directed his provincial director in Pangasinan, Virgilio Sison, to look deeper into the allegation of  Mrs. Merly Gallardo whose husband and four others allegedly committed suicide.

But as the Bayambang police investigations later showed, her husband’s’ suicide and five others, if any, were not related to the current fuss in the senate about hoarding and price manipulation of onions. The suicide in his case was prompted by the onslaught of army worms called “harabas” that infested the farmer’s onion seedling two years ago and his helplessness to pay the loans he obtained to bankroll his production costs.

Perhaps Mr. Sison committed a costly mistake when he did not course the directive through his MLGOO in Bayambang, and directly coordinated with the police whose actuations and frequency of visits alarmed Mrs. Gallardo and her family.

The visits of the police to the Gallardo family reached Senator Imee Marcos, who slammed the PNP for subjecting one of their resource speakers to an investigation, a statement that prompted the PNP higher ups to order a full-dress investigation into the matter.

The furor obviously prompted Sec. Abalos to temporarily relieve Mr. Sison from his post and only to be restored after the matter is cleared up.

A visit from Police Provincial Director Col. Jeff Fanged assured Mrs. Gallardo that the visits were not meant to harass her and family and to make her recant her senate statement but simply to find out more about the suicide incidents she mentioned before the senate committee so they can help prevent any such incident in the future.

While apologizing for his men’s actuations, Col. Fanged said they were faithfully complying with the DILG directive that led to determining there was only one suicide incident that happened in Bayambang, that of Roger Gallardo, Merly’s husband, who swallowed a spoonful of chemical fertilizer.

Curiously, the Department of Agriculture which is concurrently headed by President BBM,  not only DILG and the PNP, should have taken keen interest on the testimony of Mrs. Gallardo before the Senate panel. The DA should have been the first to be moved by her statement – the problem posed by army worms that had been pestering onion farms for many, many years.

After all, it was the DA that admitted that the 4,004 metric tons of freshly harvested onion just unloaded to the markets of Region 1 came from Pangasinan – from the traditional onion-producing towns of Bayambang and Bautista.

In this regard, it is only but logical that one or two of the cold storage facilities that DA intends to build this year should go to Bayambang!

And because most onion farmers are buried neck-deep in debts to produce onions, there is a need for regulatory agencies, including the police and NBI, to step in and look into the usurious practices of some businessmen or onion traders themselves taking advantage of the misery of onion growers.

There is also a need to organize the onion farmers into cooperatives so that they can be given greater access to loans from government financing institutions that charges low interest rates without need for collaterals.

When these are done, I am sure that Mrs. Gallardo will be endeared to her fellow onion farmers and could even be hailed as a heroine by all for exposing to the whole nation the true state of onion farmers in Bayambang.

But amid this fiery situation in Bayambang was the deafening silence of officials of Pangasinan, specifically the Sangguniang Panlalawigan, who believe it was safe for them not to poke their noses into the matter. This exposed them as incapable of protecting the interests of their constituents.

On hearing the testimony of Mrs. Gallardo before the senate committee on agriculture, the provincial government should have sent at least an emissary to Mrs. Gallardo to commiserate for the untimely demise of her husband and to assure help to her and other onion planters in the town.

Unfortunately this did not happen, which may well suggest that the provincial officialdom has no love at all for the unrelenting onion farmers of Bayambang or any farmer for that matter. I hope I be proven wrong.

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