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THE rice
crisis highlights a very serious and lamentable problem.
And this is that the Filipino farmer remains among the
most exploited member of society, despite decades of
reform, including land distribution.
Indeed,
the rice crisis explains why the country’s poverty level
has been rising despite the much-ballyhooed 7.3-percent
growth in the gross domestic product for 2007. That’s
because more than half of our people, or 55 percent, are
still dependent on agriculture for their subsistence. If
you don’t help agriculture, in effect, you are not
helping 55 percent of the population, and only the
remaining 45 percent receives assistance to improve
their lives.
This is
very poor policy. Just look at what happened to the
Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act, or Afma. It
was enacted in 1997 and should have modernized these
sectors, ensured efficient food production and raised
the standard of living of farmers and fishermen, and yet
they still remain the poorest of the poor.
Congress
should provide in Afma an average of P17 billion yearly
for agriculture and fisheries modernization. But
actually, the government had only spent an average of
P14.6 billion annually for the period 2000 to 2007. Afma
appropriations reached P23.3 billion in 2008, mainly due
to congressional prodding.
The Afma
funding was meant to be in addition to existing
expenditures geared toward the agriculture and fisheries
sectors. Instead, the government lumped together all
agriculture-oriented activities, from the budgetary
appropriation to the loans granted by the Land Bank of
the Philippines and then counted them as compliance with
the Afma spending level.
To make
matters worse, agriculture has been a favorite victim of
corrupt officials. We all know about the losses from
fertilizer funds, and we hear of many anomalies in the
construction of irrigation facilities and even in the
distribution of seeds. As a result, only a small portion
of taxpayers’ money intended for farmers actually
reached them.
In
addition, farming in the
Philippines
is a very risky and expensive business, and not only
because it is dependent on the weather. Many farmers are
reluctant to plant because of the continuing increases
in prices of inputs like fertilizers and pesticides. The
increases in prices of rice do not benefit those who
plant and cultivate them—the profits go somewhere else.
And,
because of the lack of warehousing facilities, farmers
have to sell their harvested crops at low prices. The
buyers—who have warehouses and store the grain until
prices go up—reap the windfall. The high price of rice
now, ranging from P30 to more than P40 a kilo, does not
mean anything to the farmers.
And the
farmers not only have to contend with the rice cartel,
they also have to borrow money to buy fertilizers and
pesticides, often with the projected harvest as
collateral. Thus, their crops are already pawned to
lenders long before harvest time. They are left with
virtually nothing.
And
that’s why we have a rice crisis now!
For me,
the first step in raising the standard of living of
farmers—and solving the rice problem—should begin by
looking at agriculture and its importance from the point
of view of the number of people that benefit from it,
rather than its contribution to gross domestic product,
which is low compared with industries and services.
Consider
this: we lose about 15 percent or 1.5 million tons of
rice every year from harvest time up to the time rice
reaches the consumers, mainly because of the lack of
warehousing facilities. That 15 percent would have been
enough to cover our importation. We would not have been
worried about the crop problem in Vietnam, and we would
not have been forced to look to other countries to buy
rice, if we were really serious about helping our
farmers.
The
distribution of rice bags and household goods may earn
some pogi points. Many of our people are really
going hungry. The other measures that are being
implemented to cope with the rice shortage are laudable,
but sadly, they are just another example of a reaction
policy, instead of implementing programs that have long
been put in place to prevent our present problem.
Remember
this well: we will always have a food problem for as
long as we fail to really emancipate the farmers who
till our soil.
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