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THE
Arroyo administration, battered by criticism of graft
and corruption amid heightening unrest from runaway
costs of fuel and basic items, had long stressed—and
it’s partly right—that the root of the current crisis is
“global.”
At the
same time, however, critics are also right in saying a
lot of the problems arising from unaffordable rice
prices, along with the already expensive gas and
electric prices, are the result of misgovernance and
wrong policy.
Elsewhere in this issue, in the
“Perspective” section, a special
report put together by the Washington Post used the very
apt term “food-price shock” to describe how changing
economic conditions are destabilizing world supply.
In very
layman-friendly graphics, the Post—which swept six major
Pulitzers three weeks ago—listed five “reasons for
rising food prices,” and stressed that “no single factor
can be blamed for the global food crisis; an unlucky
confluence of events over the past several years
contributed to soaring prices.” What are the five
factors?
First,
trade restrictions, with some major exporting countries
increasing export taxes, bans and other restrictions on
agricultural products in a bid to keep down domestic
prices.
Second
is the increased demand in Asia, which is all too clear
to most observers, given how surging growth in China and
India has not only led to increased food volume
requirements, but also shifts in diet, away from starchy
foods to more meat and dairy (cows and livestock consume
more grain).
Third,
the biofuels factor, which some experts had already
warned about the past couple of years, i.e., that a
sometimes irrational push to produce more biofuels,
without assessing the impact on demand for corn, could
affect the amount of corn—we’re not even talking of the
other biofuels sources—available for food. In the United
States, for instance, which exports 66 percent of the
world’s corn, the amount of the crop used for ethanol
has substantially grown.
Fourth,
fuel prices are also deemed a factor, because as they
rise steadily, the costlier it becomes to grow and
transport agricultural items. Expect this to get worse
as global crude surged to a new record on Monday of
$120.
Finally,
the weather factor, about which most countries have
suddenly taken an interest in, seeing the effects of
extreme weather in all regions of the world. Long after
Katrina struck and showed America’s own vulnerability to
weather-induced disasters, many parts of the world have
been seeing either too much rain and floods (Bangladesh,
the rest of South Asia, parts of the Philippines), or
too little (a six-year drought in Australia actually was
one trigger for the runaway rice prices); and in the
four-season countries, heat waves killing thousands in
France or burying buildings under too much snow
elsewhere in Europe.
Listing
all these global factors does not, however, signal in
any way that here in the Philippines, misgovernance or
sheer incompetence or official stupidity did not play a
role in the current crisis. These days, the government
parrots its own critics’ call for sustainable
agriculture, for modernizing farms and expanding
irrigation programs, for providing easy credit to
farmers or help in sourcing cheaper fertilizer. Yet, the
fact is that a lot of these things could have been done
if the billions of pesos supposedly poured into vaunted
farm-modernization programs had been used for their
original purposes. As stated earlier, most of the
megascams of recent years had been in agriculture: the
2004 fertilizer scam of Joc-joc Bolante; the alleged
swine scam of Quedancor; and the reported hefty
commissions from a steadily rising volume of rice
importations of the National Food Authority, which
cannot reconcile its huge outflows for importation and
trading operations with the outcome of such efforts.
Now,
with the decibel of protests rising each day as gas,
electricity and food prices rise, the already unpopular
government is scrambling to ease the ordinary man’s pain
with all sorts of subsidies. Not that all subsidies are
wrong or wasteful, per se; sometimes in crisis emergency
subsidies are recommended as a first step.
Yet, the
United Opposition (Uno) has reason to fear that the
P5-billion aid program for poor families of the
administration is just “another publicity gimmick.”
This
echoed the position of the Catholic Church—including the
Manila archdiocese’s expert on microfinancing and
empowerment for poor families, Fr. Anton Pascual of
Caritas—and civic groups that the fight against poverty
would require “an honest-to-goodness campaign against
graft and corruption in government and not mere
politically motivated doleouts.”
On
Monday, UNO president and Makati City Mayor Jejomar
Binay urged the national government to instead provide
jobs and efficient social services to poor Filipinos and
take strong steps to prevent further increases in the
prices of basic commodities such as rice and other food
items.
Lawyer
Adel Tamano, Uno spokesman, weighed in: “The P5-billion
government-aid program is good primarily as a
public-relations tool,” adding that what Malacañang
failed to acknowledge is that poverty and the food
crisis were caused by “officials’ corruption and
misgovernance.”
Sure, it
is in Malacañang’s favor that its pointman for the
P5-billion program is a very credible member of the
Cabinet, Social Welfare Secretary Esperanza Cabral, who
explained that Malacañang will use the P5 billion to
fund a P500 monthly stipend for each of the country’s
poorest families to help them cope with the escalating
prices of basic necessities under the Ahon Pamilyang
Pilipino (APP) program. Here, a family will get an
additional P300 for every child who logs at least
85-percent class attendance in a month.
At most,
three children per family could avail themselves of the
stipend. But the opposition notes that due to budget
constraints, the five-year APP program could cover only
300,000 families in the 20 poorest provinces, or 7
percent of the 4.7 million poor households in the
country—a rather small percentage.
Surely,
if it wants to do something more substantial, the
administration must put in place programs that will
multiply and deepen and expand the benefits from the
P5-billion fund. That is huge money for a
resource-strapped regime.
Past
agriculture-related scams were all touted as
bleeding-heart initiatives for rural families. Instead,
they ended up enriching a few people.
We hope
this crisis won’t provide another basis for more
stealing. The crisis—both externally driven and locally
rooted—is bound to get worse, and the more people are in
pain, the angrier they will be over more official folly.
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