Environmental (Mis)fortune

The wild card in the gardener's deck is the typhoon. A tropical depression can destroy crops in a geographically unpredictable pattern just as it can block the market access of specific regions by triggering landslides. A storm can benefit Buguias farmers if it wreaks greater damage in competing districts than it does at home. Similarly, a landslide can be a boon or a calamity, depending on its precise location. A massive break on the Mountain Trail between Trinidad and Kilometer 73 can devastate Buguias, preventing transport for as long as one month. (Small trucks might still reach market by traveling south on the Agno Valley Road through Kabayan, but slides frequently block this road south of Buguias in the rainy season: see map 8, p. 187.) A slide on the Agno Valley Road north

of Buguias is distressing, but farmers can still return to their old ways and carry produce to the Mountain Trail at Kilometer 73. A disruption of the Mountain Trail north of Kilometer 73 can actually benefit Buguias by blocking the market access of Lo-o, Mount Data, and other northern produce districts. And even what may appear to be the worst imaginable calamity can have positive attributes. Two fierce typhoons in 1989, for example, demolished the transport infrastructure throughout Benguet, but when lettuce hit 70 pesos a kilo and carrots topped 40, Buguias farmers chartered a helicopter to fly their produce to Baguio, profiting handsomely in the process.

The dry season is thus the time of relative quiescence, whereas the typhoon months are marked by unrelieved suspense. Although everyone endeavors to cultivate year-round, until the late 1970's, arid-season cropping was constrained by a lack of irrigation facilities. Accordingly, during these years the wet months formed the main cropping period. But the Buguias farmers have never shied away from the risks so entailed. Indeed, many have welcomed them, pinning their hopes not so much on steady income as on a jackpot. Their belief that the flow of luck is largely controllable promotes this attitude; the new economic realities only affirm traditional ideology on this score.