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SEN.
Francis Escudero asked Malacañang to make an “itemized
spending” of the billions of pesos that President Arroyo
ordered released Tuesday to stave off a looming rice
crisis.
In a
statement, Escudero also questioned Mrs. Arroyo’s
decision to retain the tariff on rice, citing the lack
of logic in the President’s order of tapping budgetary
savings for rice production when these can only be
realized at the end of the fiscal year.
“With
funds for agriculture now flowing like water in an
irrigation canal, the government should make public
where, for how much and for what purpose will the money
be spent,” said Escudero.
He
explained: “This will make for easy monitoring of funds,
make their recipients accountable and prevent
farm-to-market road funds from becoming farm-to-pocket
funds.”
He added
that “pinpoint-spending is the key” in order to avoid
wastage. “After all, this government has made
‘transparency’ its mantra. So like the rice it wants to
propagate, government should embrace the sunshine policy
when it comes to the use of agricultural funds.”
He noted
that farm funds are, by nature, hard to track, “as
fertilizer is soluble in water, seeds can disappear
under the soil and the proof of canal desilting is
underwater, so it’s best if the farmers themselves are
informed in advance if funds are forthcoming.”
In a
separate statement, Senate President Manuel Villar
complained that government scrimping on agricultural
modernization was partly responsible for the rise in the
prices of rice and other food products and the failure
of production to keep up with rising demand.
Villar
found no need to pass remedial legislation to boost farm
production as there is already an existing law. He cited
the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (Afma)
of 1998, but added that the law’s funding guarantees
were not met.
In 2006,
or eight years after its enactment, Afma appropriations
were still below the P17-billion minimum mark, at P16.3
billion.
At the
same time, a multisectoral alliance on Wednesday urged
the government to strengthen local production of
agricultural food crops instead of resorting to
importation to avert the country’s food crisis.
The Fair
Trade Alliance (FairTrade), at the “People’s Food
Summit” at the UP Diliman’s School of Labor and
Industrial Relations, said the government should further
strengthen the production of the country’s primary food
staples like rice, corn, chicken, pork and vegetables.
With the theme, “Hunger is Governance Crisis,” the
summit was held ahead of the food summit the government
is planning to hold this week.
The
policy of agricultural importation should be abandoned,
FairTrade said in a press release, adding that last
year, the country’s rice imports reached 2 million MT.
It also
asked the government to permanently suspend the 19 farm
agreements with China, most of which center on biofuels
production. It said biofuels production would directly
compete in the production of the country’s necessary
food items like rice and corn.
Meanwhile, while FairTrade expressed support for the
government order stopping the conversion of agricultural
lands into subdivisions, it sought more decisiveness on
the implementation of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform
Program (CARP).
It urged
for extending the CARP law with the attendant reforms
(plugging loopholes in implementation), develop the
program on balanced rural development and
agriculture-based industrialization, and transform
Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries and other small farmers
into modern farmers through appropriate
capacity-building programs.
This
developed as Sen. Loren Legarda asked the government
instead to provide more incentives to rural farmers to
boost food production.
She
issued the call for additional incentives in the wake of
reports that the world is facing a food shortage and
rising food prices due to greater demand for food amid
an expanding global population, especially in Asia.
“In the
Philippines we are already feeling the pains of a rice
crisis,” she said.
At the
same time, Legarda warned that the country’s
malnutrition could worsen if the looming rice crisis is
not averted.
She
lamented that the acute problem of malnutrition in the
Philippines will surely be aggravated by the
skyrocketing prices and tight supply of rice and other
cereals in the market.
She
cited the Second Philippines Progress Report on the
Millennium Development Goals, which noted that the
proportion of Filipino households with per capita intake
below 100 percent of dietary energy requirement was
already very high at 56.9 percent.
She
pointed out that 27.6 percent of preschool children were
found to be underweight, with 11 out of 17 regions
recording malnutrition prevalence rates higher than the
average in the report.
“What
these figures tell us is that cutting down on dietary
intake, especially rice, is not an option for us
Filipinos since over half of our population is already
undernourished and nearly 28 percent of our preschool
children underweight.”
She also
voiced concern that the 57-day rice buffer does not give
comfort to Filipinos who consider it as their staple
food, citing reports that the price of corn has also
tripled of late, while that of flour used to make bread
has also gone up.
“Past
surveys have shown that many Filipinos are going hungry
and finding that they were better off years ago than
they are today. The prevalence of hunger and poverty lay
bare the government’s claim that the economy has
improved by leaps and bounds,” she added.
According to the MDG report, 13.8 percent of the
population were living below the subsistence food
threshold and were considered “food poor.” The
subsistence level was estimated at P8,134 per capita per
year or P3,389 per month for a family of five. But
Legarda said no one could live decently on the
subsistence level being used by the government. |
