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President Gloria Arroyo assured the public of rice
sufficiency and the government’s capability to meet the food
requirements of consumers.
“There is no rice shortage, the
supply [of rice] will continue,” President Arroyo said on Tuesday,
reacting to concerns over a possible shortage of the staple of
Filipinos.
Despite the assurance made by the
Chief Executive, senators were unconvinced, particularly on a
proposal from Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap for Filipinos to
limit their consumption of rice to ease the supposedly impending
food crisis.
Senate Minority Leader Aquilino
Pimentel Jr. said the proposal reminded him of Marie Antoinette of
France who was beheaded after the French Revolution. Marie
Antoinette supposedly had said that if the people had no bread to
eat, then they should eat cake.
Senator Manuel “Mar” Roxas
2nd said Yap’s proposal can only come from the rich whose only
problem is being fat. According to him, rice is getting scarce in
public markets.
Senate President Manuel Villar
Jr. noted the supposedly high prices of rice. He announced that the
Senate Committee on Agriculture would look into reports on it.
“The hike in the prices of rice
is very worrisome, like the hike in oil prices. This poses a big
problem to us if unresolved because the shortage in rice supply
would be unavoidable,” Villar said.
He urged the administration to
immediately release the P20-billion fund for the Agriculture and
Fisheries Modernization Act to augment the budget of the Department
of Agriculture in assisting the agriculture sector.
Mrs. Arroyo made the assurance on
rice sufficiency and the government’s readiness to address the
supposedly looming food crisis in Mabalacat town in her home
province of Pampanga, where she inaugurated the P27-billion
Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway, the “Food, Freight, and Fun
Highway” linking Mega Manila and Northern Luzon.
Mega Manila is composed of Cavite,
Laguna and Rizal provinces, south of Manila, and Bulacan province,
north of the nation’s capital.
With the opening of the
expressway, the President said, delivery of prime commodities, such
as rice and vegetables, and of services between Manila and the food
baskets of Northern Luzon would be greatly enhanced.
A truck from the National Food
Authority loaded with rice accompanied Mrs. Arroyo’s convoy from
Manila during the inaugural drive-thru on the new highway to signal
that the rice-supply chain can meet the demand.
The new highway, Mrs. Arroyo
added, “will funnel food to Mega Manila coming from the rice
granaries of Cagayan Valley in the northeast or the Salad Bowl in
the Cordilleras or the Fruit Basket that is Nueva Vizcaya.”
Yap said his proposal for rice
conservation was misunderstood. At the public affairs program
Karambola aired over radio dwIZ, he clarified that his proposal was
not for everybody but for restaurants to give diners the option to
order half-cups of rice.
“I made that suggestion because
I have noted that there has been much wastage of rice in
restaurants. If diners could order only what they could consume,
then there would be less wastage of rice. I never proposed that
people eat less rice,” the Agriculture secretary explained.
Yap had acknowledged that some
crooked rice traders are repacking the cheap rice from the National
Food Authority and are selling it as commercial rice. He said the
Agriculture department had filed charges against the rice traders
found repacking the rice from the food agency.
Roxas said rice from the agency
is now difficult to find in the public markets because many rice
traders are repacking it and passing it off as commercial rice,
which is more expensive. He warned that the price of rice would go
up after October since the rice supply for the year is good for only
10 months.
Yap contended that there is no
rice shortage in the entire country. He pointed out that queues are
only found in stalls selling rice from the food agency.
The Agriculture secretary said
the people should not rely on the agency for the stabilization of
prices since it could buy only 10 to 15 percent of the local rice
produce. He added that rice shortage is concentrated in areas hit by
floods or droughts and that it is not caused by the inadequacy of
programs of the Department of Agriculture.
Yap pointed out that the rains
last year came in late August, while in other areas, there were
flashfloods in January and February, which he described as “unseasonal.”
During the first nine months of
2007, the agriculture sector grew by 4.3 percent, which helped fuel
a growth in the gross domestic product, or GDP, of at least 7
percent in that year. GDP is the total value of the goods and
services produced by the residents of a nation during a specified
period (as a year).
During a recent forum, Yap said
the food sector must grow by at least 5 percent annually to sustain
a growth of 7 percent in the gross domestic product.
Yap said investing in the
agriculture sector will have a bigger impact on increasing the
incomes of the poor compared to the non-agriculture sectors.
He cited the latest World
Development Forum report covering 43 countries, which states that
“agriculture growth benefits the income of the poor two to four
times more than [non-agriculture] growth.”
It is for this reason that the
Agriculture department is pouring in billions of pesos of
investments this year into the food sector, particularly in
post-harvest facilities, bagsakan (consolidation centers for
agricultural produce), and irrigation facilities.
The department will also organize
the National Food Plenary during the first week of April. The
meeting will primarily tackle food production and security issues.
--Efren L. Danao, Angelo S. Samonte, and Conrad M. Cariño
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