Marlen V. Ronquillo
The dream of Filipino farmers to produce enough rice for the country’s needs with a little buffer on the side, ended, borrowing from T. S. Eliot, “not with a bang but with a whimper.” The government has decided to end the tool that regulates the volume of imported rice, called the quantitative restriction or QR. The farmers, as usual, lost, which has been our fate from time immemorial.