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Some 300 leaders of farm organizations, labor unions,
economics professors and economists and representatives of civil
society—including the Church—who held a People’s Food Summit
at the University of the Philippines last Wednesday seek radical
shifts in the government’s economic policies.
They discussed the rice crisis
and food security under the theme “Hunger is a Governance
Crisis.”
The summit basically arrived at
the very same conclusions and recommendations that the Fair Trade
Alliance has been advocating for the country’s economy, the
abrogation of the government’s present policies that have led to
the diminution of both Philippine industries and the agricultural
sector.
The summit statement says:
“We, representatives of the
country’s working people—wage workers, farmers, agrarian reform
beneficiaries, fisher folk, urban poor, rural poor, home-based
producers, informal workers, indigenous people and other laboring
masses, including Church people, academicians and
industrialists—have therefore joined forces in organizing a
People’s Food Summit to counter a weak-kneed government policy
response to the food crisis and flesh out the bold measures needed
to prevent a bigger food catastrophe in the country and secure food
and agricultural security for the nation.”
The group had a “series of
sectoral and multi-sectoral meetings, which culminated in the
People’s Forum Against Hunger on March 28 at the PRRM [Philippine
Rural Reconstruction Movement], we are gathered here in the
University of the Philippines to reaffirm our ‘unities’ on the
nature of the food crisis and our common belief that only bold and
radical measures based on a people’s reform agenda for agriculture
and the economy can save the country from this emerging
catastrophe.”
The People’s Food Summit’s
collective stand states that:
1. The Philippine food crisis is
man-made, not a mere outcome of the global food shortages.
It states that the Philippines
has the land resources to grow and meet the food requirements of the
people. “However, the policies pursued by the government, with a
strong dose of neo-liberal advice from the IMF-World Bank, are
contrary to the goals of food security and agricultural sovereignty.
Efforts to develop the nation’s capacity to be self-sufficient in
rice and other foodstuffs have been subverted by the official NEDA-World
Bank policy of ‘agricultural deregulation’…”
2. The weak government resolve to
fully implement CARP has vastly weakened the agricultural sector.
3. The working poor in both the
urban and rural areas are victims of antidevelopment ‘free
trade’ regime. “Under the neo-liberal ‘free trade’ policy
regime consistently pursued by the national government under various
Administrations, the Philippine economic base has been eroded.
Agriculture as a sector has declined… And so is the industrial
sector, which has been opened up to unilateral trade liberalization
and unfair trade practices of other countries, including dumping and
smuggling…”
Among other things, the Summit
demands the “setting up nation-wide—parish by parish or
community by community—an emergency food assistance and job
creation program for the poor, the unemployed and those barely
making both ends meet. Given the extreme volatilities in the food
market, the poor deserves not only protection from hoarders but also
guarantees that they have access to affordable food items at any
given time.”
The summit also wishes the
government to take the lead in the “campaign for the early
planting of rice and other essential crops so that harvesting shall
coincide with historical lean months for these commodities.”
It also wishes the government to
initiate “a massive food production program in both urban and
rural areas. Instead of identifying the so-called idle lands for big
agribusiness ventures [foreign and local], the government should
encourage the landless urban and rural poor to undertake the
development of these lands for food production.”
Another demand is the
“Immediate stabilization of the food markets by cracking down on
hoarders, conduct of a nationwide inventory of rice and other food
products, making the National Food Authority [NFA] the price leader
in the trading of commodities experiencing market volatility, and
centralizing through the NFA the importation and distribution of
essential or staple food items.”
The summit also wants to see the
“Permanent shelving of the RP-China agricultural deals giving the
Chinese agribusiness interests unwarranted access to our land
resources, as much as 1.2 million hectares, to grow their own food
and bio-fuels in the service of Chinese food security and raw
material requirements.”
And the carrying out in full of
the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.
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