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Local Roman Catholic bishops expect the crisis of high food prices
to last up to five years, a Church official said on Monday.
“We’re looking at this crisis [to last] for
three to five years,” said Father Anton Pascual, head of the
Manila archdiocese’s charitable arm, Caritas Manila. He gave no
basis for his statement.
Pascual said Caritas has an arrangement with the
government’s rice-buying arm, the National Food Authority, to
distribute state-subsidized rice to poor neighborhoods in the
nation’s capital city.
The Philippines is one of the world’s largest
importers of the staple grain. It has been scrambling to fill up its
expected 2008 production shortfall of 2.7 million tons amid
rocketing grain prices worldwide.
Pascual said Caritas was also in talks with
private firms for retail partnerships in which consumer goods would
be offered to the poor by parish-based outlets at big discounts to
ease their suffering.
The firms include San Miguel Corp., Southeast
Asia’s top food and beverage group, and Caritas has a standing
arrangement with the local unit of Dutch-based consumer giant
Unilever, he added.
“We want them [local manufacturers] to make
Caritas their dealer. We want to sell those items for 20 to 30
percent lower than the market prices,” Pascual told reporters.
“We will take [goods with] defective packaging
like soap. What is important for us is the content,” the priest
said.
Pascual added that the Church is concerned about
poor families bearing the brunt of rising inflation. A third of the
Philippine population of 90 million or so lives on a dollar a day or
less, according to the latest government census.
-- AFP
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