Bloggers' Model Sweets Production Farm

Surfing anti-poverty and ‘global warming’ blogs can both be exciting and depressing. One feels the intense desire of bloggers to end the misery of the world’s over five billion poor. One also feels the frustration, because hardly any blogger-initiated practical solutions exist. Almost all solutions forwarded depend on politicians to act on the problem. Unfortunately, politicians seem to run out of ideas when faced with planet-scale problems. These facts force us bloggers to depend only on our blogging nets to realize our ideals. Fortunately there are ‘guerilla ways’ to solve both poverty and global warming problems at the same time, namely project modeling. The major advantage of guerilla tactics is even small groups with small weapons can go to action mode. The combined effects of numerous and endless small slashes on the poverty monster is its ultimate demise from loss of blood.

Okay, so let’s start one guerilla raid: creation of a model sorghum farm with managed fruit forest for sweets production in the Philippines. Our farm has to be highly profitable so local employee groups will copy it. Capital comes from several hundred thousand bloggers contributing $5-up each over a few months. Technologies come from Philippine consultant experts in sorghum agriculture, syrup production from sweet sorghum, fruit preservation, manufacture of sweets, culture of fruit trees, row fruits cropping, and commercial production of health drinks and anti-oxidant juices.

Farm site is a 500-hectare upland state lease, 100 hectares of which are low-slope. An upland stream net gets heavily reforested to provide irrigation water thru mini-dams and buried PVC pipelines. Our hired worker teams use three-wheel tractors to plant the low-slope plots with sweet sorghum, papaya, pineapple, melons, peanuts, sesame, bananas, red mungbean, and other fruiting row crops that fit the soil and climate. Other worker teams reforest 400 hectares of uplands. Sixty percent of forest are fruit trees: mangoes, cashew, mangosteen, longkan, papaya, fruity palms, jack fruit, avocado, forest berries, etc. The farm constructs a sorghum syrup and fruit processing facility in a nearby town that has power lines. Sweet sorghum harvests yield tons of syrup. The syrup becomes base for production of candied fruits, canned purees and fruit cocktail, fruit juices, and regional sweets. As the trees bear fruits, sweet sorghum syrup becomes the base for producing more processed fruits and fruity syrups of great variety, plus anti-oxidant health drinks, berry wines, and medicinal preparations. Currently all such products command high prices in both local and export markets. Low farming costs and high prices guarantee mammoth profits. Our farm rewards blogger contributors and other investors with quarterly dividends that are way above average financial market returns. Most profits get recycled to build another model farm to allay all observers’ doubts as to the model’s long-term profitability.

What’s the anti-poverty impact? Our model farms should encourage local employees to set up copycats on 18 million hectares of Philippine uplands. Local employees hardly have any savings for capitalizing ‘large’ businesses so they will press for a law that funnels a major portion of state budgets towards funding reforestation-based agribusiness projects. The law has to require foreign joint venture partners for every project in order to triple or quadruple local capital thru dollar investments and equipment loans. Ideal joint venture partners are Asian 1st World companies that manufacture medicinal preparations, health drinks, juices and purees, fruit cocktail, etc. Pacific Rim restaurant and fast food chains that offer desserts, fruity ice-cream, fruit pies and regional sweets should be welcomed as well. The scheme assures large export markets as well as foreign investments for the agribusinesses.

To make sure at least half of resultant billion-dollar profits get into the hands of employee masses instead of a few local entrepreneurs, our financing law must require employee borrowers to form thousand-member groups that will become the local joint venture partners. The provision spreads out fortunes in the form of stock shares and dividends among the masses. A good law takes effect forever so our ‘loans to mass entrepreneurs’ law should keep creating agribusinesses, supplier industries, service companies and millions of jobs not only in the Philippines but all over the tropics, for all time. 3rd World tropical countries will very likely copy the profit-making, job-creating Philippine model. The result can only be a major realization of our dreams for the 3rd World tropics: billions of bottom poor employed, deforestation checked, denuded lands greened, billions of tons of greenhouse gases absorbed by a greening planet, global warming toned down. And it all starts with mere loose change contributed by each of several hundred thousand bloggers over a few months.