Giving a Cow

It all started with fresh milk.

Thomas was frustrated that he couldn't buy fresh milk in the Philippines. He is used to drinking 3.5 percent fat fresh milk, and all the "fresh milk" sold in the country are really full cream milk, ultra heat-treated milk, and evaporated milk. Being a typical occasional-dairy drinking Pinoy, I could not really tell or taste the difference. For me, milk is milk.

In the various conferences he has attended because of work, he found out that Philippine importation of dairy is one of the biggest sources of budget drain in the country.

I also found out that Filipino farmers can supply only one percent of the local demand for dairy! Lack of government support has doomed efforts to establish dairy farming in the country.

We are now in the initial phases of the COW PROJECT. We are group of people who want to change all this. We are in the process of trying to establish a mid-scale organic dairy farming community in Marinduque. This would also address the employment problem in Marinduque, which was devastated by the Marcopper mining accident years ago. The loss of the mining industry in the town has dealt a harsh blow to the provincial economy. We hope that we could establish a profitable exterprise that would be owned by the people of Marinduque, and keep them from falling prey to abusive companies.

Its all very heady, these talks about how to secure grant funding from the ADB, the German government. We are still kind of clueless on how to go about it, so we are talking to several NGO experts on how to go about it.

I am also inspired by the success of Dr. Justino Arboleda, the inventor of coconet. I feel that his struggles to push for his coconut husk products to the world and his desire to help coconut farmers should be a lesson in never giving up. It took international recognition for our government to finally fund his endeavors, after 20 years of rejecting his entreaties for funding.

It took a German for me to see that I, too, can do great things for our country, and shake me out of my apathy by "looking at the big picture." It took a German for me to shake my feeling that the country is a hopeless case. Can you imagine how great our country would be if more Filipinos care for our country as much as he does? And can you imagine, he's only 20!