DECEMBER once ushered a different weather: the wet season was over and the dry set in. December was cold and dry up to January; February was warm and windy.

In yonder years, the winds of February beckoned on farmers to thresh their palay. Threshing was done on elevated bamboo platform by foot.

Harvest season was September through November. Farmers were not in a hurry: they just piled their harvest in pyramid-shaped mounds called “tumpi” in open field for months.

We qualify December with the word “once” because the one we have now is unpredictable.

It is supposed to be dry but it still rains.

In November through December in southern Iloilo from San Joaquin up to Leon towns, farms abounded with fruits and vegetables. Fields in San Joaquin and Miag-ao towns bloomed with eggplants, kadios or pigeon pea, peanuts and onions, among others.

My hometown Igbaras had garlic and peanuts. The shoreline from Miag-ao all the way up to Villa Arevalo dotted with fish traps called “punot” and “pailig” made of bamboo poles. The abundance of marine life stirred brisk sales of bamboo giving life to farmers upstream. It was not uncommon to see vehicles and oxcarts transporting the poles to the beaches.

The Tangyan River of Igbaras was navigable. Farmers bound their bamboo poles into rafts and cruise downstream, to Guimbal, where buyers waited.

Leon and Alimodian towns by late December had plentiful of tomatoes, eggplants, sayote and cabbages while San Miguel had raddish and tomatoes.

Oton had melons piled on roadsides for sale or laden on trucks to the city.

The whole of southern Iloilo bristled with economic activities after the rice cropping, the most common among them their centuries-old mango trees blooming. They were induced to flower, their fruits to mature by January through May.

All that is gone now. We have to call a spade a spade. Go to southern Iloilo and god bless you if you still can see a single “punot” standing on the shoal. There is no more fish to catch. There is no more navigable river there but only dried-up river beds during summer.

Up to the early ’90s, garlic farmers in Igbaras never had it so good. Garlic then sold at P120 per kilo at farm gate. One tilling the crop on a 2,000 square-meter field averaged one kilo of dried bulbs per square meter. That means, a 2,000 square meter plot yielded two metric tons or a gross of P240,000. That’s substantial then at that time when the minimum fare in jeepneys was only P2.00. Beer in sari-sari store was only P8 – P9 per bottle.

You are lucky if you still can see single mango tree blooming, or a plot of onions or garlic in southern Iloilo nowadays.

From September through December, Iloilo lavished on abundant and cheap lanzones and rambutan because Aklan delivered them by truckloads. Wala na subong.

The culprit, or the reason for what we see in Iloilo and Aklan is the disrupted cropping pattern that in turn is the offshoot of climate change or global warming that drenches Panay Island during its traditional dry period. That phenomenon also sears the island dry during May through July, its customary wet season that we had in 2006 and 2007.

We have no data on the economic losses from the cropping disruption. One investing in mango trees spends P5,000 to P10,000 for chemicals and labor from the pre-flowering stage up to the time when the fruits are thumb-size. However, a single drizzle can ruin all that in an instant. Garlic and onions, too, are spoiled by rains. Here is an instance showing that sound economy hinges on environmental balance, you can’t have one without the other.

The US, which comprises about five percent of the world’s population, is incidentally the principal culprit of global warming, the top emitter of green house gases from its industries, notably coal-fired power plants.

US President-elect Barack Obama offers hope to reverse what his idiot of a predecessor, George W. Bush, did. Bush unilaterally revoked the US commitment to the Rio de Janeiro Conference and shunned the Kyoto Protocol, treaties to fight global warming. We can’t bank on Barack completely given the corporate lobbies behind him.

Forget Barack. With or without him people have to act and that starts locally.

Iloilo environmentalists correctly do that by opposing Ilolo City Mayor Jerry Trenas and his cabal of racketeers who back a coal-fired power plant in Iloilo City.

Trenas and cabal propagate the superstition that this graft-ridden, backward, preindustrial country of ours has “clean coal technology” when not even the world’s richest and most advance economies have it.

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