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DAVAO CITY—From
stopping all further conversion of agriculture lands to
monitoring the expenditures of the Department of
Agriculture (DA) and the pork barrel of Congress
representatives, a nongovernment group said the Arroyo
administration must implement drastic policy measures to
tide itself over the rice crisis and preserve its hold
on power.
Tom
Villarin, executive director of the German-funded SIAD
Initiatives in Mindanao Convergence for Asset Reform and
Regional Development, said the administration must “take
these tangible moves before the crisis breaks out openly
and explodes right in its face.”
“But the
first move it must make is to accept that there’s a rice
crisis, and preparing the country ahead of that
pronouncement,” said Villarin, who is also a member of
the government’s National Organic Agriculture Board and
the Go, Organic Mindanao.
Villarin
said “these are still the hope to contain the problem
that is definitely caused by government neglect of the
problems in agriculture for several decades.”
He said
the government “must make it a national policy to have
all reclassified lands, which have been exempted from
coverage of the CARP [Comprehensive Agrarian Reform
Program], distributed back to farmers and to be planted
immediately.”
“We
could easily have at least 200,000 hectares available
for additional rice farmlands from these converted
lands,” he told a news briefing at the Lispher Inn here
Wednesday. “Government must stop all these land
conversions.”
He said
there was no more point to aggressively push for more
subdivisions and housing projects “because real-estate
business is down due to the subprime-mortgage problem in
the
US.”
Villarin
said the government must also create an oversight body
to monitor the spending of the budget of the DA and the
body must be composed of the private sector.
He said
the same monitoring should be created to look into how
the countryside development fund, or the pork barrel, of
the members of Congress, are being spent and allocated.
“We hope
that House Speaker Prospero Nograles could help us in
this and to convince the congressmen to allocate some of
their CDF to subsidize the farmers,” he said.
Villarin
has doused the optimism of the Arroyo administration
that there is an adequate supply of rice.
On the
contrary, he said, “the harvest season is almost over in
many parts of the country, and we would be facing the
lean months, from May to September, while the
traditional sources of rice imports have changed their
position in supplying rice in the country.”
He said
Vietnam “has already changed its tone, probably because
a lot of other countries are vying for their rice.”
“The
source of the supply is actually becoming a problem,
with some rice-eating countries already being troubled
by food riots,” he said.
“The
crisis is expected to drag till the year-end,” said
Villarin, who said he does not know how the government
could sustain the dilemma. “There is also the problem on
where it would source the money that the President said
she would allocate for importation.”
Villarin
said the President has already announced she would
release P23 billion for this, “but when she was asked
where to source the money, she just told that April food
forum that it would be up to [Budget Secretary Rolando]
Rolly Andaya and [Finance Secretary Margarito] Teves.”
“With a
low revenue collection, I don’t know where that money
would come from,” he said.
Elenita
Daño of another nongovernment group, the Third World
Network, said even Thailand, a major rice exporter, “has
convened a Cabinet meeting to discuss about the problem
now with its exportation.”
“It
convened its Cabinet [Tuesday] to discuss how to
regulate its export now to ensure the domestic supply
for its own people, because it would be ironic for a
major rice producer like
Thailand
to suffer a rice crisis,” she said.
“Actually, the problem is getting much worse for a
country like the Philippines, which has become dependent
on importation of rice,” she said.
She said
the domestic reality of having passed over the harvest
season “with still very high prices of rice, and
climbing, and having trouble with finding now a country
which would be willing to supply the country with our
needs, would be a problem that the government has to
face.”
She said
the rice crisis would “definitely place the government
in a lot of trouble.”
“We all
know that rice is a political crop, we have been told
that for decades,” she said. “So any disturbance in the
supply of that crop would create an imbalance, and it
would be bad for a country with a fragile government
like ours to be in such a situation.” |
