‘Teach a man how…’

“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

There is some amount of disagreement as to who really came up with this adage but one thing that is certain, the statement has become institutionalized in the realm of agriculture, self-sufficiency and empowerment. Ironically, in the real world, much of the “teaching” has been done by a parent, brother or elder. The teaching is out of necessity, survival or the need for everyone in a family or community to be productive and contribute to daily food needs.

Many of us learned by doing chores such as feeding pigs, chickens or goats. Others by joining the “hunt,” going out to fish or caring for sick animals. In Third World countries or less developed agriculture-based nations, the current trends have been on mechanization, genetic manipulation, corporate farming and digital technology or high tech such as drones for seed dispersal, fertilizer application or plotting. The obsession is with producing more instead of doing it right.

In the Philippines, it seems that we are utilizing the solutions of First and Second World agriculture in a Third World nation where available land is small and markets fractured. To make matters worse, the government and “experts” have been pushing for modernization and increased productivity but have been dismissive about the need to “teach a man how.”

Ironically, in the pre-COVID/pre-ASF period, ordinary backyard Filipino hog raisers produced 60 to 65 percent of the total volume of hogs in the country. Many of them operated on sheer guts and winging it and not much from training or teaching.

While traveling to different provinces in the Philippines as volunteer trainer and product endorser of BMeg Animal Feeds, I was shocked to discover that there is only one international training center for pig husbandry and it is located in a city behind the SM Mall in Lipa City.

The International Training Center for Pig Husbandry is a Dutch-funded training center that gives various training programs related to raising pigs, breeding pigs, as well as the economics of pig production and management. I have enrolled in their 10-day hog raising course