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The discussions on how to ease the rice crisis validate what a few
right-thinking Filipinos have assumed all along: that our country is
not a country for sane men.
The dominant voices, those sought by the media
for their views on what to do about the problem, have proposals and
ideas that defy sanity. To be very kind about it, the farmer at
ground level who knows his rice farming has viewed the spewed
opinions and ideas as belonging to the following: far-out,
unrealistic, hysterical, downright stupid.
Even the old guards of the peasantry, those
grizzled enough to be the “wise men” of the movement with
supposedly discerning opinions, tiptoed at the peripheries of the
rice issue, missing the core and the roots.
And the media keep coming back to them, as if
only skewed, outlandish, uninformed and self-serving views are the
only ones that can sell newspapers and attract 30 to 40 percent of
prime time television viewers.
One peasant group, the self-proclaimed
torch-bearer of farming interests, even proposed a cap on palay
prices—to further impoverish the farmers who for the first time in
their lives got the chance to sell palay above production costs.
A good 90 percent of the discussions focused on
the rice queues, how much NFA should price its subsidized rice, how
many countries are still winning to sell rice to us amid depleted
stocks and soaring rice prices in the global market.
You are forced to ask this question: Are these
jerks Filipinos?
Because a sane mind will premise the dissection
of the rice crisis with this question: How do we solve this? Neither
hysteria nor palay price caps will.
A sane mind can write down what can and should
be done, a step-by-step thing, a virtual how-to, a manual on how to
remedy the rice shortage.
First step is a crash program to rebuild
broken-down irrigation systems. There is an P8-billion irrigation
fund in the national budget. A fraction of this is enough to
rehabilitate the barely-functioning irrigation systems across the
farming areas of the country in a very short span of time, say a few
weeks.
The rehabilitation of the irrigation systems
will be an immediate boost to the effort to make the country
self-sufficient in rice in the short term. Because this will shore
up the depleted A-1 rice areas (the irrigated rice areas serviced
whole year-round), by 20 percent, at the very least.
If the government can tap an additional 300,000
to 500,000 hectares of idle and barely-utilized land for rice
production for the rainy season crop, we are looking at two million
hectares of prime land ready for big-time (not marginal) rice
production.
Those who know rice farming, like the contours
of their warts, will tell you that in Central and Southern Luzon,
those who turned to tilapia, catfish and mudfish farming by
bulldozing their rice lands and digging ponds out of these lands,
are mostly bankrupt. They want to go back to rice farming but they
can’t because of the high cost of filling up the pond with
agricultural soil.
If the government can extend emergency loans to
them at cheap rates, we are looking at another 200,000 hectares of
land for rice.
After the irrigation systems have been
rehabilitated and enough land is secured for rice production, the
farmers just need a fraction of the P43-billion agricultural fund
promised by the Arroyo administration to put in place mass
production of hybrid seeds; fertilizer and pesticide subsidy; and
post-harvest facilities.
In a 120-day cycle, our rice supply problem will
ease considerably. Yearly imports can be trimmed down to 500,000
metric tons a year.
More support for agriculture after the
completion of the crash rice production program will yield miracle
results. In two or three years, with moderate support, rice farmers
can turn things around and make the Philippines either
rice-sufficient or rice-secure.
Question: If the problem were that simple and
only moderate assistance was required to turn things around, why did
we end up in this sorry state? It is really embarrassing—a nation
of rice farmers importing 2.2 million metric tons of rice.
The only answer to that is this is not a country
for sane men.
mvrong@yahoo.com
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