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WHEN Sen. Edgardo Angara, a former agriculture
secretary and currently chairman of the Senate committee on
agriculture, revealed the loss of millions of pesos in public funds
because of the ineptness of the National Food Authority (NFA), only
a few eyebrows were raised.
The reason: everybody knows that
the NFA is not in the business of making money from its trading
activities. Its function is to cushion the impact of high prices on
the country’s staple food through subsidized pricing.
But the figures cited by Angara
were staggering: P48 billion in losses and P69 billion in
outstanding loans in NFA operations in 2007. If the NFA continues to
operate this way, Angara said, by 2010, its accumulated loss will be
P111 billion and outstanding loans P136 billion.
Short of saying that the NFA
should be abolished, Angara said that the agency should stop trading
rice and leave the private sector to engage in the rice importation,
adding that if private rice traders are allowed to import and sell
rice without restriction, the price of rice will stabilize.
Stabilize at what level, Mr.
Senator?
The good senator, we surmise, is
not unaware that the price of rice in the global market has risen to
$1,000 per metric ton from only $430 early this year. With these
global prices can we expect the private rice traders to offer us
lower rice prices?
In the deregulated oil industry,
the oil cartel increases its pump prices willy-nilly every time the
price of world crude oil goes up. This can happen in the rice
trading if left entirely to the private sector.
Subsidy a necessary evil
Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are
self-sufficient in rice. Even in a regime of trade liberalization,
these countries, particularly Japan, rejected calls to open their
rice market to imports.
These countries protect their
farmers from competition from abroad. They also heavily subsidize
their farmers. That is why farmers there are rich; they have big
houses and several cars and can send their children to top
universities.
The billions of pesos used to
subsidize the sale of imported rice by the NFA should be given
instead to the farmers in the form of high-yielding seeds,
pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation systems and post-harvest
facilities. And also higher farm-gate prices to encourage them to
produce more.
And our leaders should stop
listening to the World Bank and other international trade groups
that say it would be cheaper for the Philippines to import rice than
to invest in rice farming. This is pure hogwash.
Work, not publicity
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap
should also stop issuing press releases but buckle down to work.
These are critical times that need critical resolutions, not
publicity stunts.
Every time I open my car radio, I
always hear Secretary Yap being interviewed on radio. When I switch
to another station, I would again hear his voice being interviewed
by another newscaster. The secretary seems to be available all the
time for interviews. I wonder if he has any time left to attend to
his duties.
The long queues at NFA stores
selling cheap rice belie Yap’s claims that the rice problem is
being attended to and everything is under control.
Food security
We have done this during Marcos
time. Under the Masagana 99 program, the Philippines actually
exported rice.
Under President Arroyo, the DA
has started the Ginintuang Masaganang Ani (GMA). Despite the DA’s
crude attempt to ingratiate itself to the President by adopting the
GMA initials, the program is worth looking into.
GMA Executive Director Frisco
Malabanan has said that rice self-sufficiency can be achieved if the
program would get full government funding.
To achieve this, he said, the GMA
program needs a budget of P10 billion for next year. This year’s
budget is only P2.631 billion.
Malabanan said that the amount
would be spent to upgrade our rundown irrigation systems, put up
more post-production facilities, meet the seed requirements of
farmers, subsidize their farm inputs through liberalized credit and
give them good prices for their produce.
You don’t have to be a
psychologist to know that a hungry person won’t listen to reason
anymore. Hunger could easily turn to anger. We will just have to
remember that it was hunger, or the absence of bread, that triggered
the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in October 1917 when mobs of
hungry Russian peasants and workers—the proletariat—stormed and
ransacked first the food warehouses and eventually the palace of
Czar Nicholas, culminating in the execution of the entire Romanov
family.
Do we have to wait for this thing
to happen in the Philippines? 
opinion@manilatimes.net
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