A fund similar to pandemic allocation

There are, at least, two international cable television networks that have, in recent years, been showing the lifestyle of “doomsday prepers” a somewhat different breed of people. As we discern from the TV programs, doomsday prepers are persons who anticipate the occurrence of holocausts and prepare for such eventualities. In their minds nuclear wars are imminent, the collisions of large asteroids against the earth are inevitable, financial disasters leading to violent clashes are forth coming, volcanic eruptions of Mt.Etna gravity are likely to come, earthquakes and tsunami of the intensity demonstrated in Japan in March 2011 are foreseeably taking place.

From one episode, I saw a Japanese engineer making an impregnable home for his family many meters deep into the bowels of mother earth. In another telecast, there was shown an American millionaire who bought an abandoned missile silo and converted it as his own steel and solid concrete hide away, while there were other Americans constructing their own sanctuaries far from population centers. All of them filled their supposed safe houses with consumables as well recyclables good for extended periods of time. They all want to prepare for all these unimaginable calamities less mindful of enormous expenses. By any calculations, the costs of their acquisitions and assumed maintenance would be in amounts far beyond the reach of ordinary Filipinos. In fact, it is not at all impossible that during the peak months of the Covid 19 infection, in the middle of 2020, some of them sought refuge in their shelters.

What foreign doomsday prepers are doing ordinary fellow Filipinos cannot hope to accomplish even half such endeavors. So, true to the off tangent nature of this column, let me focus on what can our government do to help ordinary citizens meet future catastrophes.

Since the coronavirus has overtaken what could have been an otherwise anticipatory plan, let our officials explore specific measures by way of answering this question: Can Cebu City food producers feed the city residents in case lockdowns prevent the flow of food items from sources outside the city boundaries? Differently asked “can our city be self-sufficient in times of extreme conditions”? My own answer may sound more hesitant than cautious, but yes, our farmers in the city’s upland areas can provide needed consumables provided that our government wills itself to support them.

The city allocated over a billion pesos to meet the harsh effects of the pandemic. Of course, the direct effects of such budgetary outlay are still to be evaluated and accounted for. Even then, appropriating similar sum to provide our marginalized farmers with useful equipment, seeds, fertilizers and pesticides will not make them “doomsday prepers” but will surely generate work opportunities, convert idle lands to productive agricultural fields and increase reserve stocks.