|
THE food crisis is real and will last for a long
time. The less we inject politics to it, the less will be our
problems coping with the food crisis. The shortage of food is
worldwide. Rice, corn, bread, milk, pork, chicken and beef will cost
much more than you can ever imagine, assuming they are even
available.
You see will long lines of people
buying their staple food. You will see boycotts, riots and
governments being overthrown. Food price inflation has reduced
considerably people’s purchasing power. In Manila, the rice that
could be bought for just P18 a kilo last year is no longer
available, unless you pay P30 a kilo, a 66-percent increase.
West Bengal and Mexico have had
food riots. India, Yemen, Burkina Faso and other countries are
seeing signs of food riots. Australia ousted its prime minister this
year after a ten-year drought that devastated that country’s wheat
crop.
In the Philippines, 16 million
Filipinos said they missed a meal at least once in three months last
year. That happened when rice was still P18 a kilo. Even at that
price, there was a shortage of eight percent (or one million tons)
of total demand for rice. That’s the official estimate before the
crisis erupted. After the crisis, the government of President Arroyo
ordered 1.5 million tons of rice from Vietnam and is tapping
additional supplies from Thailand. The shortage, more likely, is
more than two million tons valued at $1.4 billion (P58 billion) at
current rice price of $700 a ton.
The Arroyo government, already
under siege following allegations of lying, cheating and stealing,
will have a difficult time delivering what it cannot deliver—food
on every table, which she promises to do by the end of her term.
What will happen is that with her heavy infra spending you will have
beautiful roads where no food trucks will pass through simply
because the provincial harvest has not been enough to load into
trucks to service food-starved urban areas like Metro Manila.
To me, what should be done is put
a stop to everything that is being done—building roads, power
plants, industrial zones, high-end villages—and focus on just one
thing—produce food. It can be done.
If a 50-km first-class highway
like the Clark-Subic-Tarlac Expressway can be built at a cost of P27
billion in less than two years, there is no reason why we cannot
open half a million hectares of new ricelands for probably the same
amount of money. We have plenty of idle lands. The government alone
has two million hectares; the private sector more so. Don’t worry.
There is plenty of kickback money in agriculture. Jocjoc Bolante has
proved it, with his irrigation scam (more than P700 million
disappeared). Cito Lorenzo’s Quedancor has proved it with its
swine scam (more than P1.5 billion disappeared).
What we can do is allow the
bureaucrats to steal and steal big, as long as they produce rice,
the staple food of Luzon, and corn, the staple food of Visayas and
Mindanao. Anyway, even if the bureaucrats overprice rice projects by
100 percent, the price of rice will double in the next five years,
if not earlier. So, today’s greed will be cured by time, just so
people will have something to eat. Greed is the opposite of hunger.
And usually during crises like what we have now, they remarkably go
in tandem to meet a need like food.
It takes P100,000 to irrigate
again every hectare of rice land. Some 400,000 hectares of rice
lands need to be rehabilitated with new canals and mini-dams. That
will cost P40 billion. To open up new rice lands, you need P1
million per hectare with entirely new dams and irrigation systems.
Each hectare produces 3.77 tons of rice. To cover the two
million-ton shortage, you will need to irrigate 530,000 hectares and
provide them hybrid seeds, fertilizer and plenty of water.
So there—P40 billion to solve
the rice crisis. Overprice that by 100 percent and you will need P80
billion. How much did GMA collect from the E-VAT? P80 billion. So
money is not a problem. Political will is. And greed.
biznewsasia@gmail.com
|
