Community pantry and its unintended consequences

You may feed a man a fish every day for a hundred years, but you’ll never make him a fisherman. In no time, you will make him a mendicant, a beggar, and unwittingly reward indolence. We have already seen how politicians have acculturated the once-productive masses into minions for their control, setting into motion the country’s spiral from being among Asia’s major economies to a pariah. We have had enough of them.

In this time of pandemic, we need to be resilient. Individual resilience translates into collective resilience. Resilience, however, is built NOT on charity, or beggary; it is built on the back of difficult experiences that steel resolve in a person; it is built on industry. 

Responsible people may have been pushed into dire circumstances by this pandemic, but they do not go out hunting for doles. They remain willing to participate in life and make a dignified living. They are the ones we ought to be out to help.

While there’s undeniable value in this community pantry movement we should be cautious not to overdo it. It should be targeted to most vulnerable individuals and families like that elderly woman with three orphaned children in her care, or one who is an invalid. It should not be open to all, if we were to avoid its unintended consequences—we are already seeing lazy freeloaders and opportunists hopping from one pantry to another, pantry raiders!  

To be more responsive, we can tweak this community pantry idea into a “work for food program,” where ordinary able-bodied folks can work in an organized menial job offering and be paid food, instead of money. This takes thinking and creativity, considering that there are works that are suspended during ECQ and MECQ (so is pantry congregation), but this should not deter us. 

One idea is to make people work on seedlings preparation; in exchange they will be paid food, as well as seedlings that they can grow into food in as fast as 20 to 30 days, with their care as their equity. Likewise, they can work on a chicken hatchery and broiler production, where they may be paid food and chicks that they can grow in a few-square-feet space for eggs, or meat. 

We can also organize tree-planting activities and provide cash crop seedlings that community planters can plant in between trees to allow them to generate short-term cash stream, in the process motivating them to continue to care for these trees until they develop past nursing stage, and into self-sustaining full-grown natural carbon sinks. 

There could be hundreds of ideas out there that we can utilize. What is important is we expose the people to ideas and activities that develop resilience in them.

It is equally important that we coordinate with LGUs for health protocol enforcement and even for works that they might need to farm out to the community. No matter how cynical we are of LGUs and the national government, it will not help our cause to be adversarial with them, or to be at their crosshair. We may criticise the government; that’s within our right. But let us continue to work with it, local and national. And it’s not hypocrisy; it is a working democracy. 

If people don’t show up, it is because they don’t deserve help—no need to wonder why or analyse.
 
We should stop treating charity events like a crowd drawing contest.