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Asia is
home to 600 million rural poor subsisting on less than
$1 a day. Three of every four poor people live in rural
areas, dependent on agriculture for a livelihood.
In the
Philippines two out of five people live off the land.
Agriculture produces a fifth of the national income and
almost 40 percent of the total employment. A vast
majority of the poor belong to the rural sector—very
much mimicking the rest of Asia.
The
Philippines hosts the command center of two prominent
international organizations, the International Rice
Research Institute (IRRI) and the Asian Development Bank
(ADB).
The
Senate last week strengthened the international status
of the IRRI, formally conferring upon it the privileges
and immunities usually accorded to diplomatic stations.
The IRRI was founded through partnership and
collaboration among the Philippine government, the USAid
and the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. It is the
flagship of 14 international agricultural-research
institutes located throughout the world under the
umbrella of the Consultative Group of International Rice
Research (CGIAR).
The
IRRI’s groundbreaking research on rice during the 1960s
produced the miracle rice—a high-yield, short-gestating
and drought-tolerant rice variety. This brought about
bountiful rice harvests worldwide for over three decades
and filled the rice bowls of almost half of the world’s
population. Its collection of rice germplasm is the
largest in the world, with more than 100,000 rice
varieties, some near extinct and many endangered.
To help
the Philippines absorb the research breakthroughs in the
IRRI, Dr. MS Swaminathan, one of India’s top plant
breeders and the IRRI’s then-director general, together
with Dr. Ricardo Lantican of UP Los Bańos, helped me set
up the Philippine Rice Research Institute in the
mid-1980s. Philrice is now one of the better
rice-research centers in
Southeast Asia.
The
other international institution based in Manila is the
ADB. From where I sit, the ADB’s contribution to
agriculture has been marginal.
Although
the ADB’s loan portfolio to the Philippines has been
increasing, these are unduly biased toward urbanization
and fiscal consolidation. In 2006 the ADB approved $650
million loans—its highest lending since 1998—geared
toward the energy and fiscal sectors. These are, of
course, important to economic development. But its
lending and technical assistance to agriculture has
slipped since its peak in the 1980s, sliding from $666.5
million to $371.7 million in the 1990s, and $405.1
million from 2000 to 2007. Accounting for inflation,
lending from 2000 to 2007 actually decreased by a
quarter from the 1990s lending level.
For a
development bank whose mandate includes helping
eliminate poverty in Asia, it has virtually turned a
blind eye to Asian poverty’s rural face. This neglect is
a towering failure of the ADB, comfortably ensconced in
its plush offices and high-end residences, a luxury
partly subsidized by Filipino taxpayers.
During
this first decade of the 21st century, we are witnessing
the tragic result of this unforgivable underinvestment
in agriculture. According to the International Rice
Commission, the productivity of farm lands in Asia has
been declining. With rice consumption and population
growth continuing to outpace food production, and
climate change threatening to reduce our capability to
produce food, the first global food crisis since World
War II is all upon us.
The
IRRI’s presence in the
Philippines
is providential to the Asian agriculture sector, but so
can the ADB’s. It is high time the ADB started
recognizing what its global counterpart, the World Bank,
has recently realized—that growth in agriculture is the
most effective means to combat poverty and attain true
economic development, one that will lift everybody’s
boats. Through the IRRI at the helm of rice research and
the ADB in financing, Asia, in general, and the
Philippines, in particular, can make the most out of the
two international institutes it houses.
E-mail: edgardo_angara@hotmail.com. Web site:
www.edangara.com. |
