THE MANGO POLITICS

When I wake up this morning my eyes poped-out seeing a big mango on our table, I ask people around where did it come from and they said it’s a gift from a friend of my mom-in-law from Calinan this city, they have a mango farm and they breed, cross-breed, marcot, graft different varieties of mangoes, vocabularies you often hear from people involve with this industry.

I was stunned because the night before I went to sleep I was reading Life Moto’s Blog about a report in Yahoo news runned some days back about a 3.5-kilo mango fruit from Iligan City, some 12 hours bus ride from Davao city northwards, was certified as the world’s biggest by the Guinness Book of World Records.

This mango is Florida in variety which was grown by Sergio and Maria Socorro Bodiongan from that city and surpassed the 2.4-kilo mango from Canada.

The mango that stunned me, but was amazed more by the Guinness Record breaking mango. The big mango is about 1.5 kilos (I was not able to ask what variety is this mango as it was already in our table when I woke up), and the small one is just about half a gram. The mango model is paid P100 a day and is still complaining.

My reckless thoughts began rolling, Oooh! Is this really how far humans had gone? We had surpassed the age of discovery and we are already in the age of mastery, we have mastered technology, biotechnology in this sense that we were able to reengineer nature to our own desire, we accurately have played god altering nature, even have altered life at its most fundamental level.

With this technology people will no longer go hungry, gone were the native mangoes where seeds are bigger than the meat, now you can have seedless on everything, from virtually everywhere available on our grocery shelves.

But then questions loom, Who can access this technology? Can small farmers afford to grow this given anticipated high-priced pesticides and fertilizers?

A lot of radicals would say, our problem on the shortage of food is not the lack of it, but a problem of distributing it.

So in the end, mango is not just a mango that you feed your stomach dipped in whiff salted rotten fish (I just love this stinky rotten fish) but a mango that is politically laden with honors and price.

Let me end this lithany of mine, believe if I say, he who controls the seed controls the food.

Thanks for reading, see you again for another experience in this side of town.