The biggest decision farmer Florencio Baribar has to make in the next few days is whether he should lay down his new tobacco seed or burn the drying shed and plant something different such as corn.
The wiry, dusky 63 year-old is the last of a long line of tobacco planters in this hamlet in the far northern Philippines, the heartland of one of the country's most valued cash crops.
With the Ilocos region's short wet season drawing to a close the tiny, brown tobacco seeds must be put to bed in time for the start of the planting season in January.
But cut throat pricing, rising competition from China and soil degradation from centuries of intensive cultivation have all taken their toll on tobacco farming here.
For Baribar, who farms a half-hectare plot, a wrong move would presage economic calamity.
All his neighbors have given up tobacco and taken their chances with corn and tomatoes.
"We will try to plant tobacco seedlings," Baribar says in a forlorn voice. "I hope they will still buy our leaf."
His flue-curing barn, a huge oven built out of bamboo, clay, straw, and water buffalo dung, is the last one standing in Baay a Bassit, a village nestled among bamboo groves near the town of Batac.
When the three-month tobacco harvest season begins in March, it is constantly fired up, fueled by trees cut down from the nearby hillsides to cure the big green leaves of Virginia tobacco into a golden hue that in better times past fetched about 56 pesos (US$1) a kilogram.
A big pile of tree cuttings are drying out under the fierce heat of the tropical sun in a pile beside the barn, ready for next year's furnace.
They may not be needed.
Earlier this year, tobacco buyers took one sniff at his leaves and pronounced them unfit for making cigarettes. If he gives up the crop, the curing barn will be superfluous.
"The tobacco hectarage is falling because about 260 hectares have been recorded to be saline areas," says Norma Lagmay, the top agriculture official of Ilocos Norte province, one of the top-four tobacco-growing areas of the country.
"Saline areas will no longer produce a quality leaf of tobacco," she says.
She said more than 65,000 farmers from 27 Philippine provinces still plant tobacco on some 42,000 hectares. Last year the Ilocos region produced 70.7 million kilograms of tobacco leaves worth 2.83 billion pesos (US$515,000), or 59 percent of the national total.
The government sets a "floor price" that gives tobacco farmers a 25 percent mark-up on their cost of production, but they still have to make the grade.
"On the surface, the quality is fine but it fails the smell test," the farmer Baribar says of the tobacco leaf harvested from his farm. "They tell us it smells sour and the color fades quickly."
Government scientists have been warning the people of Baay a Bassit and nearby areas for some time that their soil has become "salty," but some like Baribar insisted on planting tobacco.
The provincial government is providing cash, seeds and fertilizer to convince tobacco farmers to turn to other crops.
But Lagmay says the change has been difficult for some to accept because tobacco farmers "had been getting much higher incomes."
Shifting to corn would cut earnings to about eight pesos a kilogram.
Tobacco has been grown in the Philippines since Spanish rulers introduced the crop to its Southeast Asian colony in the 17th century.
It found a new home in the narrow coastal plains of Ilocos on Luzon island's west coast, which endures a long dry season, and many families prospered, especially the cigarette-makers on top of the tobacco production chain.
Lucio Tan, an eastern Chinese immigrant who owns cigarette-maker Fortune Tobacco, among other holdings, is listed by Forbes magazine as the richest man in the Philippines.
Major international tobacco firms including Philip Morris maintain a big presence in the country, running cigarette manufacturing factories as well as using satellite marketing firms that provide support to tobacco farmers through loans and seeds of superior varieties.
Saline areas must stop growing the crop for the sake of the national industry, says Mario Corpuz, local manager of the Batac office of the National Tobacco Administration (NTA).
"If we insist on planting tobacco in those identified marginal areas the quality of Philippine tobacco would suffer in general," Corpuz says.
Already, he says, imports for cigarette blends are more than Filipino tobacco exports.
"We found out that the quality of tobacco being produced in the country is somewhat not competitive because of quality."
Both Corpuz and Lagmay blame the soil salinity and low-grade tobacco leaf on "unacceptable farm management" practices, including improper use of inorganic fertilizers, particularly chlorine-based commercial fertilizer varieties.
Corpuz names China as "our major competitor today" after the Asian neighbor finally managed to grow surplus tonnage for export.
Some government officials privately express concern that the big tobacco firms will shift their investments out of the Philippines and into China.
The NTA here is teaming up with the tobacco lobby to convince local farmers in other areas to grow better varieties of "full-flavored tobacco", or those that have a higher nicotine content and higher sugar content, making them more aromatic.
Growing these varieties, such as one called NC-2326, locally will improve the country's trade balance for tobacco products, Corpuz adds.
"The global campaign against smoking is strong, but the agency is not overly concerned about it," Corpuz says. "Based on our studies, there are more new smokers than those who kick the habit."
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