This is a re-posted op-ed piece.
TYPHOONS Pedring and Quiel have literally rained on Secretary Proceso Alcala’s parade. Or rather his dream of rice self-sufficiency for the Philippines. It’s good to have a dream, to be sure. But it becomes bad when the dream raises false hopes; as it did, in this case, when the secretary proudly announced—and even had President Aquino include it in his last State of the Nation Address—that the Philippines would stop buying rice from other countries by 2013.
Many critics are saying some of the President’s men are taking advantage of their closeness to him by giving him false information that he unquestioningly adopts as his own only to realize later that the info was wrong. The secretary appears to have done this to his boss; he fed the President with figures about the cereal that, had Mr. Aquino examined closer, would have made him realize that he was actually being taken for a ride. And to think that one of his first ancestors from Fujian, China, who came to the Philippines during the latter part of Spanish rule was a rice merchant in Malolos, Bulacan.
But we are digressing.
As early as the time of Manuel Luis Molina Quezon, the Philippines was already buying rice from the US when strong typhoons would hit our Central Luzon rice fields. For the past 50 years, the only time we did not import rice was during the early years of President Marcos when he named his Executive Secretary Rafael Salas as rice czar and for two years we produced more than we ate. Then, during martial law, with Marcos throwing millions of pesos in credit to farmers through Masagana 99, along with seed and fertilizer subsidies, we had about three years of rice self-sufficiency in the late 1970s. But while it increased rice production, it was an expensive exercise and it soon had to be tapered down.
When the debt and financial crisis hit us in the 1980s, government funding for the palay farmers became a trickle, and we were back to importing rice. If memory serves, Roberto Sebastian, FVR’s agriculture secretary, clung to the same dream of rice self-sufficiency but in 1995, after the FlorContemplacion hanging in Singapore plunged FVR’s ratings, we underwent a severe rice shortage marked by near food riots.
Despite tens of billions poured into the GinintuangMasaganangAni (GMA) rice and corn self-sufficiency program of the Arroyo administration, the dream also eluded us. The only ginto went to the pockets of corrupt agriculture officials and, many say, certain big guys in the Palace. Truth is, we became the world’s largest rice importer. But that tag was erased this year when the National Food Authority imported only 800,000 tons of rice, a mere third of what GMA’s agriculture officials did in her last year.
Mr. Aquino’s NFA administrator, LitoBanayo, was quoted as having complained early this year that he would have wanted to import a few hundred thousand metric tons more, perhaps afraid of what the typhoons of the “ber months” could do to our crops. But were learned that his chairman, the agriculture boss chided him, claiming that “we have achieved the highest production in history.”
For a while, the secretary seemed right; sufficient rains fell, followed by sunshine during the harvest season, restoring our production levels to the 2009 output. But this went down substantially during the long El Niño-induced drought of 2010. The agriculture secretary somehow convinced the President that the high 2011 summer harvest was just a preview of things to come and that in 2013, we will not import a single grain of rice.
Reports say the secretary was so obsessed with his self-sufficiency dream that old-timers in the Department of Agriculture (DA) who cautioned him about his “impossible dream” found themselves removed or canned. The secretary’s spirits soared when the President incorporated in his second State of the Nation Address in July, the no-rice- importation promise. Expounding on this, Alcala said later that all the country would need to import for 2012 will be 500,000 metric tons, or just a fifth of GMA’s last-year imports of 2.45 million metric tons.
But then, the gods of mischief intervened, sending Pedring and Quiel to wreak havoc on our crops—and wreck Alcala’s dream. Still, he refused to give in; before the Senate Committee on Finance the day after Pedring hit, he downplayed the effects of the typhoon, quoting reports that only 39,000 metric tons of harvestable rice crops were destroyed, or less than 1 percent of the national requirement.
But the governors of Isabela, Cagayan, Nueva Ecija, Bulacan and other parts of our rice granary gave different figures that were buttressed by media pictures of thousands upon thousands of hectares of rice fields with crops almost ready for harvest destroyed by a combination of wind and flood currents. Even the DA’s regional office in Central Luzon came out with a preliminary estimate, three days after Pedring, that some 350,000 metric tons have been destroyed. Then Quiel hit on Saturday, lashing Region 2 with howling winds and rains.
Ironically, the day before Pedring hit on September 27, a Task Force on Rice and Other Staples formed by the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization, chaired by the eminent Dr. Emil Javier, former UP Los Baños chancellor, submitted a report to Alcala that said “achieving self-sufficiency by 2013 is an impossibility” and while “2016 (the last year of the Aquino administration) may be possible, it is still overly ambitious.”
Let’s hope the committee can help the secretary scale down his target and make it “more possible.”
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Source: Business Mirror, Opinion, Oct. 3, 2011
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