By: Joe Sprite

Last week, a team from the municipality went to the barangays on a survey on the development plans of each barangay. This is in line with coordinating their plans with the municipal planning. A questionnaire was distributed asking participants to identify problems and the order of priorities in their solutions. The problems were malnutrition, lack of proper shelter, medicine, low-income level and unemployment or under employment. There were other problems but those were the ones that stood out in the minds of the participants.

The solution to all those was established as the elimination of low income. The rest will be solved. The question is how. Employment is scarce. Major employment opportunities in Jagna are only in the so-called labor and in sales. When we mean labor here this means transferring goods from cargo trucks to warehouse, from warehouse to cargo trucks or transferring cargoes between trucks. On the pier area, there is stevedoring and portering.

The only field where women are mostly employed is sales. However, there are only a few stores, which employs them. The opportunity open for them is self-employment. Sales, calamay and cookies making and some processing like chocolate are for women and fishing for men. These are for coastal barangays. For those in the upland, farming would provide the source of income. Barangay planners are exploring opportunities of self-employment but that is a tough problem to solve.

Coastal barangays depend on fishing for livelihood. Individual ventures mostly. There are few, who put up fishing units complete with motorized boats, long nets and other paraphernalia. This takes money so only those with capital will venture on this area. Those outfits employ three to five crews on a sharing basis. Here, the chicken today feathers tomorrow life is the usual condition. Fishing follows the biblical seven years of plenty, seven years famine routine.

Cooperatives were introduced but cooperatives died a natural death. Cooperatives prospered in Israel . Individualistic Jews formed and ran kibbutzim out of necessity. Here organizing cooperatives in a fishing community is like throwing tomcats in heat into an empty room. There will always be fights. Everybody wants control in one-way or another. No one wants to be a private in the organization. The only form of cooperative system that may work here are family corporations but it can only exist if the family head is strong.

What remain for the barangays are individual ventures. Those in the coastal barangays will fare badly. First of all they have no entrepreneurial skills. They cannot look for a field where they could operate. They will barge into enterprises that had succeeded. Without proper training on that area, they will fail. The second is they do not have enough fiscal discipline. Almost all cannot be contented with a 25% net. They want a net profit that ranges far beyond 100%

Once a venture is prospering, they let it go to the dogs. There were those who ventured into poultry and hog raising. They let themselves be hostages to feed stores. They do not look for feed equivalents on the local market. When the project is running they leave the management to hired hands. Or it could be this way. When the founder of the business dies no son or daughter will take his place.