A modest way to buy local

I recall an incident that took place a long time ago. A businessman friend of mine reacted to my article where I wrote that even our toothbrush was made in China. In my column, I expressed my disappointment in finding out that a familiar fluorescent bulb I was looking for bore markings of not being fabricated in our country anymore. My write-up was not funny to my friend because I learned belatedly that he was raking huge profits from his importation of electrical supplies. While he used his learnings on economics to tell me why such giant manufacturers as General Electric and Philips pulled out of the Philippines and transferred factories mostly to China and such other neighboring countries like Thailand and Malaysia, he sounded rather more derisively than friendly that I was asking the government to revive and strengthen the “Filipino First” policy of the late president Carlos P. Garcia. Indeed, I believe I lost a friend because I expressed in this column a few more times a developing advocacy for Philippine productivity.

I remember that sad incident upon reading a news item the other day. Secretary Carlos Dominguez, of the Department of Trade and Industry, talked about my favorite line - for Filipinos to buy Philippine-made products. The secretary said “Buy Local. Go Lokal”. Domingo lamented that the coronavirus has damaged our economy (it has worldwide!) and a viable remedy is to patronize locally-produced goods.

It will, perhaps, take our leading economic lights to write volumes on enticing back to our shores companies that closed their shops here and left us. Even then, formulating policies designed for most of these industrial firms to come back to our shores must be done. For a start, they may study the new economic direction of Japan which is asking its firms to stop operating in China and repatriate to their homeland. There must be lessons to learn from this rather new Japanese strategy.

In all humility, such a needed dissertation lies beyond my ken. So, let me focus on what my ordinary mind can observe. Cebu City, with its big chunk in hilly terrain, is just one half the area of Bayawan City, Negros Oriental. But our agricultural produce here is believed to match that of Bayawan. The ingenuity and industry of Cebuanos account for this. Yet, if one surveys the mountain barangays, he will find out that there are still many patches of untilled land. “Buy Local. Go Lokal” must start here.

The city can spur the agricultural productivity of our mountain folks by investing in massive support systems. We have to consider that in just three months’ time, our city already spent over a billion pesos in COVID-19 related efforts and we are still not out of the woods yet. In other words, we have resources. Not too long ago and in a number of articles containing specific ideas spread over time, I wrote in this column about the need to help our farmers. Initially, the city can provide the use of farm equipment like tractors, put in advance seeds and fertilizers, construct post-harvest facilities. When we make our people earn from their farms, they will have money to “buy local”.