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“NFA is doing its mission very well”
This is to clarify some issues
raised by Mr. Marlen Ronquillo in the story “Rural crash”
referring to the operations of the National Food Authority (NFA)
that appeared in his column “Sunday Stories” in the October 8
issue of your paper.
Last April, the NFA
increased the buying price for clean and dry palay from the previous
P11.50 to P17 per kilo inclusive of incentives. The increase in the
price of palay definitely improved the income of farmers, helping
them cope with the increasing prices of petroleum products and
expenses in farm production. Even when fuel prices have started
going down, the agency maintains the high support price for palay to
encourage farmers to sell their produce to the agency. With the
NFA’s active palay buying, the average of actual palay bought
daily is 112,829 bags. For the month of September, with the main
harvest barely starting, palay procurement has already reached more
than 2 million bags or more than 210 percent of the month’s target
of almost a million bags.
Since April, the NFA has already
bought 3.1 million bags of palay and has already spent P 2.6 billion
for the purpose. The agency’s buying price is likewise being used
as a benchmark by traders, preventing ex-farm price of palay from
going too low. On a nationwide basis, ex-farm price of palay has
been monitored at an average of P14 per kilogram. Should the
government further increase the support price for palay, it might
trigger another round of rice price adjustments that in the long run
will also prejudice the interest of the majority of consumers,
including the farmers.
Meanwhile, the NFA continuously
distributes affordable rice nationwide in support of the Anti-Hunger
Mitigation thrust of the government which seeks to reduce poverty
and incidence of malnutrition among the marginalized sector of
society. The NFA sells rice at P18.25 per kilogram in community
based outlets such as the Tindahan Natin, Bigasan sa Parokya,
Bigasan sa Barangay, Barangay Bagsakan outlets and the NFA Rolling
Stores. High-end rice varieties are also available at P25 and P35
per kilogram at Institutionalized Bigasan sa Palengke and licensed
NFA retailers, respectively.
The NFA’s rice was priced
in such a manner that the poor could continue to buy affordable yet
quality rice. Meanwhile, the availability of NFA rice in the market
at relatively lower price than the commercial variety is enough to
preempt unwarranted rice price increases and a repeat of the long
lines of customers wanting to buy government rice. The NFA is
subsidizing about P16.70 per kilogram of rice with 25 percent
brokens, which comprise the bulk of rice the agency is distributing
to the market. To date, the NFA has already sold some 32 million
bags of rice to the consumers.
Admittedly the NFA is losing
money. But all its monetary losses translate into providing a steady
supply of rice nationwide at a price affordable to ordinary Filipino
consumers, while providing farmers a higher income that keeps palay
farming profitable. These are “social costs” that the government
must necessarily incur as part of its social responsibility.
REX C. ESTOPEREZ
Director, Public Affairs
NATIOONAL FOOD
AUTHORITY
SRA Bldg., North Ave., Diliman
Quezon City
Doctor defends
Bas and Paguia
Mr. Aureli Sinsuat misses a very
essential and most basic point that practically all apologists and
supporters of Reproductive Health Bill 5403 refuse to address:
contraception is against natural law. As such it is an intrinsic
evil that is against human nature.
This law binds all human beings,
whether one is Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, Iglesia ni
Kristo, atheist, animist, Buddhist, you-name-it, etc. This immutable
truth is the core of this thorny debate. And so far, these
apologists choose to dwell on peripheral and emotionally-laden
issues since they don’t have a single valid argument against it.
None. Nada. Zilch. In other words, faced with a huge brick wall in
front of them, they’d rather skirt around the “contraception is
intrinsically evil” issue and foist red-herring arguments on the
public to push their dubious agenda. Their ideology? The end
justifies the means. Bingo!
Not surprisingly, the Church’s
stand is deeply rooted in the most logical and bullet-proof
reasoning from Pope Paul VI’s prophetic 1968 encyclical Humanae
Vitae. I quote verbatim from an article from the American TFP
website:
“Humanae Vitae: the encyclical
that condemned the sexual revolution.
“The encyclical clearly
explains why it reaffirms the Church’s perennial doctrine: The
Church cannot change God’s Law expressed in nature. The document
states:
“ ‘Since the Church did not
make either of these laws, she cannot be their arbiter—only their
guardian and interpreter. It could never be right for her to declare
lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is
always opposed to the true good of man.
“ ‘The encyclical is based on
natural law and on Revelation, both of which manifest the will of
God. The Magisterium of the Church was given the mission not only to
interpret Revelation but also natural law, and it therefore
addresses morals in all its aspects:
“ ‘Jesus Christ, when He
communicated His divine power to Peter and the other Apostles and
sent them to teach all nations His commandments, constituted them as
the authentic guardians and interpreters of the whole moral law, not
only, that is, of the law of the Gospel but also of the natural law.
For the natural law, too, declares the will of God, and its faithful
observance is necessary for men’s eternal salvation.’ ”
The late Bishop Glennon Flavin of
Lincoln, Nebraska, in his pastoral letter “In Obedience To
Christ” written in 1991, affirms the Church’s immutable and
universal teaching on contraception.
“The ban on contraception is
not a disciplinary law of the Church, like abstinence of Friday,
which the Church can enact and which the Church can dispense for
good reasons. Rather, it is a divine law which the Church cannot
change any more than it can change the law of God forbidding murder.
Contraception is wrong, not because the Church says it is wrong (it
was wrong before Christ established the Church); it is wrong because
God Himself, through the revelation of His Son, Our Lord Jesus
Christ, has declared it to be wrong. Because contraception is
intrinsically evil, it may never be practiced for any reason, no
matter how good and urgent. A good end never justifies the use of an
evil means.”
May I share with you a reply I
wrote to a recent PDI article written by former UP Dean Raul
Pangalangan which addresses this issue in detail? In it is the
explanation why Natural Family Planning is not the same as
contraception.
Dr. Jose Maria P. Alcasid
rcrvision@yahoo.com
Who imposes
what on whom?
Mr. Sinsuat has the freedom to
believe what he wants to believe. The point is that most people,
including scientists, doctors and medical school professors and
textbooks do agree – without regard to any Catholic, Orthodox,
Jewish or Muslim teachings – that human beings begin when the
sperm and the ovum meet.
I don’t understand why he
thinks Mr. Bas and Atty. Paguia are imposing anything on anybody by
defending the fertilized ovum and unborn life from being destroyed
by a mother who doesn’t want her pregnancy to develop. It is in
fact HB 5403 that is imposing the duty on doctors, nurses and others
who are asked by a mother who wants to kill her fertilized ovum (who
to me and other believers in God is a tiny baby) to do so (kill)
even if it is against their consciences because they believe the
fertilized ovum is already a human life.
Ruben V. Calip
rubenvcalip@yahoo.com
Forcing families
to fertilize every egg
Sinsuat accuses Atty. Paguia and
Columnist Rene Bas of “forcing upon the family the burden to
fertilize every single egg that is possessed within a woman
(numbering in the hundreds)” and therefore “you [they] are
impeding upon the family’s right ‘to a family living wage and
income.’ ” Then he says “It is not fair, neither to the
parents nor the children, for children to be born into the world
without sufficient planning, means and responsibility. You give the
gift of life with one hand and take away the quality and dignity of
that life with the other. You, being men of the flesh and thus
understanding both the temptations of the flesh and the weakness of
men, refuse to help your fellow man by giving the choice of
preventing conception so that he will not be faced with the terrible
option of committing that horrid sin of aborting a conceived
child.”
Why should those be Atty.
Paguia’s and Mr. Bas’ fault. Why couldn’t Sinsuat see that
with some responsible practice of continence or natural family
planning a couple would be able to avoid pregnancy? Why does Sinsuat
make Paguia and Bas responsible for preventing a man from facing”
the terrible option of committing that horrid sin of aborting a
conceived child?”
Does Sinsuat realize that most
contraceptives work by preventing the conceived child (the
fertilized ovum) from being able to cling to the mother’s uterine
wall where he or she could then receive sustenance from the mother?
J. B. Price
kbprice@comcast.net
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