Farm policy for the CNMI

Q. Do you think we need a farm policy to assist our farmers and strengthen our economy? I know that, when the weather is nice, I produce plenty of things. Then to sell it I have to run around the island, which is often a very frustrating experience. If the weather is bad I have little to sell. Seems like every which way I’m a loser. Can you also give examples of other countries about their farm policies?

A. Farming is more of a lifestyle than a business in a typical sense. Often people are doing farming to maintain a particular lifestyle and to hold on to their family traditions. Farming by its nature is very much dependent on the forces of nature. It’s true, as you have said, that farmers lose both in good and bad weather by overproducing or producing very little. By making use of advances in technology, corporate farming has been able to effectively handle both of these situations whereas small family farmers are unable to take advantage of such technologies.

Small family farmers, if let alone, have little chance to survive. Major industrial nations have acknowledged this fact and spend significant amount of resources to help the farmers. For example, in the United Sates we spend hundred of billions of dollars on direct and indirect subsidies to farmers to keep them in business. Similar to this is the case of major European countries and Japan. Primaries reasons for supporting farming are food security and the preservation of rural farming lifestyles.

International prices of food commodities at times may be lower than producing at home. But, still many countries prefer to produce locally than buying them from abroad. For example, the Japanese can buy rice from the international market at around 10 cents a pound but they prefer to produce this at home at a cost of about one dollar a pound. Sometime in the name of free trade there is pressure from trading partners to liberalize trade but many countries in Europe, Japan, and the United States continue such policies to protect their farmers.

Here in the CNMI there is hardly any plan in the books with a set of desired goals and an action strategy. A startling fact is that there may be fewer active local farmers than the people in the bureaucracy to serve them. Astonishingly, a bill to support the local farmers was proposed in the previous Legislature but that bill could not even make it to the committee hearings. A great potential exists to produce specialized products locally to cater to the highly developed tourism industry. It’s all up to our policymakers to continue the course of dependence on imported produce or to revitalize the agriculture sector by adopting judicious farm policies.

(Ashraf is an International Resource Economist. He is solely responsible for the views expressed in this column and doesn’t represent the views of Saipan Tribune. His email address is ashmdr@hotmail.com)