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THE age
of cheap rice in the
Philippines
is over. Agriculture expert Rolando Dy said rice prices
in the country, as in many countries in the world, will
continue to rise due to the country’s underinvestment in
agriculture.
“The
government has not invested in agriculture and rural
development. The Afma budget is not funded [and there
is] poor resource use [due to] graft and corruption.
[The] quality of infrastructure [also] leaves much to be
desired,” Dy said in a lecture on Tuesday.
The
government’s gross underinvestment in agriculture can be
seen in the decline in the budget for the Agriculture
and Fisheries Modernization Act (Afma) of 1997.
Dy, who
is also executive director of the University of Asia and
the Pacific (UA&P) Center for Food and Agri Business,
said the government should be investing around P19
billion a year for Afma, on top of the regular budget
allotted for the Department of Agriculture (DA).
However,
in recent years, the government has only put in an
average of P11 billion annually to fund the Afma budget.
In 2006, Dy said the government only put in P11.46
billion into the Afma budget.
Furthermore, instead of investing around 1 percent to 2
percent of the DA budget in agriculture research and
development every year, the actual investments were only
0.25 percent annually.
“In
other words, we cannot reap what we did not sow. We
failed in reducing rural poverty compared with other
countries,” Dy said.
“Countries which invested in agriculture have less
proportion of poor [such as] China, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Thailand, and Vietnam,” he added.
Another
factor that contributed to the rice problem are the
frequent announcements of the National Food Authority (NFA)
on the procurement of large rice stocks. This, Dy said,
serves as a trigger mechanism to increase further rice
prices. Just like
Indonesia
and Malaysia, the Philippines, he said, should carry out
these efforts discreetly so as not to send wrong signals
to the market.
To allow
the country to cope with the rice problem, Dy urged the
government to focus its rice subsidy program on the
needy, which requires the DA’s close coordination with
the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD)
and local government units.
Dy said
the rice subsidy program, which takes the form of rice
sold by the NFA at P18.25 a kilo, should be part of the
poverty alleviation program of the DSWD.
Filipinos, according to him, should also learn to look
to food alternatives to minimize rice consumption. These
alternatives are saba banana, camote, squash, cassava,
sweet corn and gabi as well as jackfruit and breadfruit.
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