"The Philippines is a country of rice eaters."
"The Philippines is a country of rice eaters."
Recently, the president signed EO 135, which seeks to address what is expected to be a 10-percent shortfall between consumer demand for rice versus the country’s production of the staple.
The executive order reduced the most favored nation tariff rates on rice imports from 40 percent to 35 percent and 50 percent for out quota sources. It shall be effective for one year.
The presidential spox explained that the government just wants to be sure about our rice security. In the same breath he claimed that there would be a bumper harvest of rice this year, but we have to ensure that the country has enough for our rice consumption requirements.
The Philippines is a country of rice eaters, where the per capita rice consumption is some 126 kilograms per year. This compares to other countries nearby, where individual rice consumption averages 50 to 55 kilograms per person per annum (Japan and Taiwan). And although the Vietnamese eat just about as much rice as we, they produce a surplus which is one of their main food exports.
On a good production year, we import 8 percent to 10 percent of our consumption requirements. On a bad year where harvests may have been felled by strong typhoon winds or flooded out by torrents of water streaming down the Sierra Madre, we go as high as importing 15 percent of our staple food need. There were some aberrant years where we exceeded 15 percent, but that’s more a story of corruption than consumption.
Palay farmers of course reacted negatively, saying that the lower tariffs would further reduce the buying price for their produce, which for the past two years since the Rice Tariffication Law took effect, has lowered their incomes considerably.
Clearly, Malacanang is not taking any chances. 2022 is an election year, and it cannot afford a rice price spike just when people already hungry due to the joblessness imposed by a series of on-again, off-again lockdowns would troop to the polls to decide between continuity and change.
The problem is that our government has castrated the National Food Authority, which President Ferdinand Marcos created by decree to stabilize food prices by market intervention. So now, the lower tariffs will be beneficial to rice importers, but whether or not the natural workings of the law of supply and demand and competition will stabilize prices or increase profits for the greedy remains to be seen.
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But why do Filipinos eat so much rice?
The culprit, as I see it, is in the high price of other foods, particularly vegetables and fish, poultry and other sources of protein. “Lamang tiyan” rather than good nutrition rules our daily diet.
Basta’t may bigas, mabubusog. Never mind if the meal is just carbo-loading laced with bagoong, or daing, or in really desperate instances, even plain salt.
This has always been the challenge of our agriculture department, and the traditional approach has been merely to ensure that there is enough “affordable” rice, with importation being the cheaper and easier recourse.
Policies are skewed towards cheap rice, often at the expense of forgetting the need to produce more vegetables, harvest more fish from our waters, or produce more chickens and hogs. And yet, our palay farmers groan at their “magtanim ay ‘di biro, maghapong nakayuko” plight, while the key to real food security is giving the farmers profitable incomes, so they will continue to plant more rather than teach their children to forswear farming and line up at OFW recruitment agencies instead for better jobs abroad.
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Which is why we were so happy to troop to Central Luzon last Thursday in spite of oven-hot temperatures, to inspect along with our counterpart from Taiwan, Representative Michael Pei-yung Hsu and his staff, a proposed site for a Taiwan International Cooperation and Development funded project which would be a training center for our local farmers on how to adopt new and better agricultural technologies to increase productivity and farm incomes.
It may be a small step, long overdue, but thanks to the encouraging support of the Department of Agriculture, now under Sec. Willy Dar, it could be the beginning of a program to encourage more young people to go into farming by learning and applying modern technologies.
Hand in hand with this is the Young Farmers Internship Program where young Filipinos would have hands-on and on-site training in modern farms in Taiwan, the knowledge they learn hopefully to be applied in our country, and would eventually make farming a “sexy” enough enterprise once again.
There are a thousand and one things that we need to put together to achieve our aspiration of food security and the sustainability of our farming and fishing industries.
We can only hope and pray that the next administration that people would vote into office come May 2022 will take agriculture seriously and have proactive solutions to ensure food security, which is in truth, the most fundamental aspect of national security.
