Itlog Mo Noy Orange

Back in the 1980s if you took a bus South of Cebu you’d make a few stopovers to drop off and pick up passengers, and buy snacks.  A small army of vendors would swarm all over the bus selling ampao and other snacks.  Most of them would shout, “Itlog mo noy, orange!”

Literally, it means “Your eggs, sir, are orange.” Syntactically, it means, “Sir, buy some hard-boiled eggs and a bottle of Tru-Orange.”

Why hard-boiled eggs and orange soda? Older cousins who went on these trips explain that hard-boiled eggs are easy to handle and eat, go down well with just a bit of salt, don’t require utensils or hand washing, and are quite filling. Orange soda helps travellers to swallow the egg yolk, which can be powdery and tends to stick to the sides of the throat. Apparently Tru-Orange didn’t produce as much stomach acid as the other soft drinks did. Bottom line, these were the food items that travellers liked and bought. So this is what the vendors sold.

I often tell this story to friends who think government should not bother to invest in agricultural development. These friends are prone to point out that most developed nations have small agricultural sectors compared to their commercial and industrial economies.  They would say there is no modern state with an economy based on agriculture. If we want a stronger Philippines, they say, we should put our money on building the commercial and industrial sectors.

They even have World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and International Monetary Fund studies to back them up.  The more educated ones talk about the ideas of Nobel prize- winning economists whose work helped to establish this school of thinking - Wassily Leontief (1973), Robert Solow (1987), and Arthur Lewis (1979).

Well, they might have economists on their side. But any businessman would say, sell what people buy.  If there’s demand, and there’s an honourable way to make a profit, make a business of it.  This applies to eggs and orange soda, to consumer electronics, to real estate – and to agricultural products.

Today some of the tastes – and economics – of snacks on bus travel have changed. Friends who take the Southern Cebu buses tell me they don’t hear “Itlog mo noy, Orange” anymore – although they still sell ampao in Carcar. There are now more air-conditioned buses; these don’t make as many stops between the South Bus Terminal and their destinations as regular buses. There are bakeries, pasalubong shops and a donut store in the terminal, hence lesser demand for snacks along the way. 

The demand for agricultural products is also changing.  For one, more people think organic vegetables and fruits are good for health and even therapeutic.  This idea has been around since the 1920s when Dr Max Gerson prescribed a diet of organic food for cancer patients and claimed impressive success rates. While his ideas have not been adopted by the mainstream medical authorities of the United States, they have been spread around the globe through printed and online publications, by individuals and organizations that have experienced the healing effects of organics. In Cebu City there is at least one wellness centre or village that helps even Stage 4 cancer patients recover by, among others, eating only organic food.

The increased demand for organic products has raised its prices.  This in turn has encouraged more farmers and farmers’ organizations to venture into organic farming. The trend has extended into poultry; in lieu of chicken pumped full of hormones and raised to maturity in 22 days, organic farmers sell free-range chicken raised over six months.

At least one LGU, the Municipality of Maribojoc, is providing loans to farmers who have decided to grow organics.  It uses reward money from DILG’s “Seal of Good Housekeeping” program, which is a million pesos for every year they get the Seal. Since they’ve qualified for the Seal over the last two years, they’ve loaned out small amounts to farmers willing to raise organic products. Mayor Jun Evasco is looking for more because farmers need more capitalization. 

Now that they own the land, the challenge is to help them make more out of it. When the land is agricultural, the logical course of action is to increase the value of their agricultural produce. That might go against the theories of Nobel laureate-economists but there is demand for organics, there’s profit in producing organics, farmers need help, and the local government is helping them. No big theories there, just plain business.