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PRESIDENT Arroyo’s policy remarks about the government
strategy on rice, as quoted from her interview this week
with the Wall Street Journal, underscores the perils of
shortsighted policies, especially the costly ones that
offer quick but fleeting solutions instead of
sustainable remedies to chronic problems.
In the
Wall Street Journal interview, the President was quoted
as saying the government, whose imports-happy policy in
past years had given the government the distinction of
being the world’s top rice importer—despite hosting the
International Rice Research Institute that trained
Southeast Asia’s rice experts—is finally considering a
deliberate shift toward increasing local rice production
should the global price of rice continue to soar.
Officials had earlier taken pains to explain that the
importations were not meant to line the pockets of
bureaucrats with kickbacks—as critics have long held—but
were the result of sheer practical consideration, i.e.,
production is so costly in the Philippines that it was
cheaper to import rice than have our farmers produce
more of it.
But from
that same argument arises the question of why locally
producing rice is so expensive, and the government is
left with the burden of answering that: Because there’s
so much wastage from the farm to the postharvest and
distribution, to the actual consumption stages of rice.
Because the farms have not been modernized and made more
efficient, despite the billions expended for fertilizer
support, irrigation, farm implements, postharvest and
distribution facilities. The huge funds poured
supposedly into the agricultural programs could have
made rice farming efficient enough to bring down cost,
thus reducing the argument that it’s cheaper to import
rice than make it.
The
cheaper-to-import argument, at any rate, has been
undercut by market forces in recent months, as the price
of rice grew more than 40 percent in the international
market—the surge helped along, ironically, by the
Philippines’ own big tenders for rice, a matter that
some Korean rice experts complained about for making
rice more expensive for everybody. Thus, it came as no
surprise that Mrs. Arroyo, an economics graduate, held
out the option of reducing rice imports and changing the
mandate of the National Food Authority in the light of
new developments.
While
she’s in this reflective/assessment mode, she should
pause, as well, from the frenzy of subsidies and doles
that comprise the administration’s knee-jerk response to
recent public complaints against soaring prices of not
just rice but also bread, meat and livestock, vegetables
and most other staples; not to mention gas and fuel
prices that now make virtually anything more costly to
produce.
The
Catholic Church’s in-house microfinance expert, the
Asian Institute of Management-educated Fr. Anton Pascual
of Caritas, is right: If people are to be truly
empowered or lifted out of poverty, they must be given
the means to do so through jobs and livelihood programs,
and not doles. This is why he has frowned on a plan to
simply give the poor money.
For her
part, Social Welfare Secretary Esperanza Cabral has
clarified that the funds will not be doles, but will be
given out in exchange for measurable achievements by the
poor families, such as the report cards of children whom
their parents have managed to keep in school, bucking
the high dropout rates in public schools. Yet another
useful indicator is the health of the pupils, the
rationale being that parents who take the effort to
fight malnutrition despite their financial limitations
deserve some monetary reward. These and similar
schemes—basically incentives for measurable social
development goals—have worked in poor communities in
Latin America and parts of Asia, and it’s fair to
presume they could work in the
Philippines.
However, they form only a segment of the P5-billion fund
that the government is willing to toss after the problem
of high prices and shrinking food supply. And therein
lies the rub.
People
want to know how the government can ensure that more
billions of taxpayers’ money is not wasted further from
any hare-brained scheme to reduce poverty. People demand
assurance that an Executive facing the lowest popularity
and public satisfaction ratings ever would not be
tempted to impulsively throw its money into bottomless
wells of ill-conceived programs and gimmicks just to
score brownie points.
Meanwhile, this same knee-jerk response seems at play,
as well, in the ongoing debate of whether—and by how
much—to increase workers’ wages, given the fresh burdens
wrought by rising prices.
Note
that it was the President herself who, two weeks ago,
suddenly ordered the regional wage boards to convene and
deliberate on wage-increase petitions. On the surface,
she was right in the sense that labor is chafing under
the oppression of increasingly expensive essentials
vis-à-vis shrinking salaries.
But, as
an economist, she is well aware of the inflationary
impact of any haphazard, across-the-board wage
increases, and the impact on small and medium businesses
that even now are also reeling from the same global
factors that caused prices to rise in the first place.
Yet, as
this paper’s reporter writes in the news pages, the
Palace is stampeding the wage boards to convene and
short-circuit guidelines, even the most basic
requirement of notifying all parties about hearings.
Sure, the Executive may end up with something dramatic
to announce on Labor Day, and presumably hope to curry
some favor with the angry worker class. But then again,
it’s the same knee-jerk response at work, and the
problem is that in the long run, it will not really
solve the crisis but possibly just worsen it or create
new ones. |
