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Birth control and friendly ties with the world’s
top rice exporters will help the Philippines survive soaring food
prices, President Gloria Arroyo said on Friday.
“We are challenged to promote
birth spacing because even if our rice production is growing more
than our population, we have been importing rice since the Spanish
[colonial] times and we have not yet closed that gap,” President
Arroyo added.
Even though rice yields are
growing above the population growth rate of 2.04 percent, the
Philippines is not yet self-sufficient in the staple grain, she told
a group of businesswomen in Manila.
One of the world’s largest rice
importers, the Philippines has been hard-pressed to meet its import
target this year of 2.7 million metric tons (MT) as prices have
soared due to bad weather, the rise of the biofuels industry,
urbanization and strong global demand, among others.
Because of this, Agriculture
Secretary Arthur Yap ordered the National Food Authority (NFA) to
buy palay (unhusked rice) for the rest of the year to encourage rice
farmers to produce more.
Population-control programs in
the Philippines, a largely Roman Catholic country, had often
foundered in the past as a result of opposition from the church,
which says artificial contraceptives promote sexual promiscuity and
immorality.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Arroyo also
gave herself a pat on the back for having anticipated the rice-price
crisis.
“We have reached out to Vietnam
and Thailand long before the shortage,” she said. The two
countries are among the world’s top rice exporters.
Yap said the NFA should buy all
the surplus harvest of the farmers from the still ongoing dry-season
harvest, which is expected to end in June, as well as from the wet
or main cropping. The President recently ordered the food agency to
maintain its palay support price of P17 per kilo until the end of
December.
“In this month of May and as we
enter June, there are a lot of provinces with surplus harvests that
will need the support of the NFA, as it continues to buy palay at
P17 per kilo,” he added.
Yap said “the President’s
order for the NFA to maintain this support price is a clear signal
to farmers that we want them to continue producing, and we want them
to produce more at a profit.”
The Agriculture department’s
Rice Action Center reported that as of May 5, harvesting for the dry
season has been done in about 77 percent of the areas planted
totaling 1.87 million hectares, with production reaching 5.893
million MT.
Yap said the department will also
focus on massive production and propagation of new seed varieties
developed by the International Rice Research Institute that are
higher-yielding, more adaptable to adverse weather conditions such
as drought and flooding, and more resistant to pests and plant
diseases.
--Ira Karen Apanay, Jomar Canlas And AFP
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