Rubber Tapping as a Source of Income

During our house to house surveys, we discovered that most of the residents source of income is being a rubber tapper. While doing our house-to house surveys, we had the chance to witness the selling of rubber or “goma” as termed in Bisaya dialect. All the rubber farmers, especially up on the mountain goes down every Wednesday to sell the rubber that they collected. We also used this opportunity to interview some of them and we gathered that the selling price of rubber per kilo is really cheap. It compensate them for the hard work that they do while collecting it. It’s really hard to live by being just a rubber tapper that’s why they do other side jobs to earn extra money. According to some of them, selling one kilo of rubber is not even enough to buy a kilo of rice. It’s really sad how our rubber tapper farmers are not being acknowledge and properly compensated. Our team hopes that the barangay council and local government unit can find ways to help our struggling rubber tapper farmers and their family.