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Myrna
Lacdao used to eat two meals a day. Now she eats one, and
gives the rest to her two grandchildren.
Lacdao,
53, shares a 70-square-foot shack in Manila’s San Roque
shantytown with her husband, two adult children and
grandchildren. After the price of rice rose 41 percent in
the past year, only the youngsters get three meals a day.
“I just
take coffee in the morning and then have lunch at noon,”
said Lacdao, who makes pillow cases for sale to neighbors,
contributing to the family’s monthly income of P9,000
($215). “That’s my first and last meal of the day.”
Increasing
global demand for food, speculation in commodities and
rising fuel prices intersect in San Roque, where 8,000
families live in wooden huts with roofs made of scrap
metal and plastic.
Rice
futures had their biggest weekly gain in at least seven
years last week on concerns export curbs by
China
and Vietnam will spread as importing nations struggle to
feed their people. The Philippines, the
biggest rice importer, received offers for only
two-thirds of the grain it sought to buy on April 17.
A kilo of
rice cost P34 last week on the open market in Manila, up
from P24.07 a year ago, according to the Bureau of
Agricultural Statistics. While the National Food Authority
sells rice to the poor at P18.25 a kilo, that accounts for
only 10 percent of consumption, according to an April 15
report by analysts at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.
Empty
plates may further undermine President
Gloria Arroyo’s administration in a country where
street protests toppled leaders in 1986 and 2001. Her
approval rating dropped to 27 percent in March, the
third-straight quarterly decline, according to a
survey by pollster Social Weather Stations.
“This
could be the tipping point,” said
Earl Parreno, an analyst at the Institute for
Political and Economic Reforms. “Her statements must
cascade into concrete steps that would put food on a poor
man’s table.”
The
National Bureau of Investigation is pursuing traders
suspected of hoarding rice and officials who conspired to
repackage subsidized grain for sale on the open market.
The administration said this month it would spend P43.7
billion through 2010 to boost rice production.
“The
government is sparing no effort to ensure that our
supplies of rice get from the source to the tables of
Filipinos throughout the nation,” Arroyo said in an April
15 speech.
San Roque
sits on 30 hectares of government property the squatters
claimed because they can’t afford their own land.
There are
no roads or sewage system. More than half the people of
working age are unemployed, community leader Ruben Coprado
said.
Coprado,
who sells soap, coffee and charcoal to small shops, spends
P9,000 a month on food for a family of five, 80 percent
more than last year. They subsist on rice, vegetables and
fish, eating meat just once a week.
“Most
people in the neighborhood only eat rice with instant
noodles or sardines just to get by,” he said.
Magdalena
Onia, 27, earns as little as P50 a day scavenging plastic
and wire from a nearby dump. She used to have running
water and electricity for a single light bulb.
Now, the
cost of feeding her five children is so high, she fetches
water from a common well and uses candles.
“Some
days, I can’t even send them to school because we have
nothing to eat,” Onia said.
The
Philippines imported 1.9 million tons of rice last year,
or 16 percent of its needs.
About 15
percent of last year’s rice crop was spoiled because of a
lack of drying facilities or lost during milling and
delivery, said Frisco Malabanan, director of the
government’s hybrid rice program.
The
Philippine government shouldn’t have followed a World Bank
recommendation to stop stockpiling grain in favor of
buying it on the world market, said Raj Patel, a visiting
scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and
author of Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden
Battle for the
World Food System.
A June
2007 World Bank
report said the
Philippines
should reduce grain stocks and use them for “disaster
mitigation and safety net programs” instead of “price
stabilization.”
“The
Philippine government had been strong-armed in various
ways into adopting the kinds of policies that militated
against its being able to stockpile grain,” Patel said.
National
Food Authority deputy administrator
Vic Jarina dismissed Patel’s criticisms, saying the
government keeps at least a 15-day supply on hand. The
Philippines consumes 33,000 tons of rice daily.
San Roque
sits 4 km from a rice warehouse owned by the National Food
Authority.
Rice
shortages in 1995 prompted some residents to storm the
warehouse and demand that officials sell them grain.
Tensions are escalating again.
“We never
see that National Food rice around here,” Lacdao said. “If
it reaches a point when I can’t even feed my
grandchildren, I wouldn’t think twice about jumping that
high fence and breaking into that warehouse like we did in
1995.” |
