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Gloria Macapagal Arroyo did not create the rice crisis but she created the situation that made us exceptionally vulnerable to it. She was the one who obsessively pursued a policy of relying on global markets for rice on the ground that it was cheaper to buy it than to produce it. Other countries, including the developed ones, refused to do it, putting food security at the top of their list. Japan, for whom buying rice would have been worlds cheaper than producing it, continued to produce it even at great cost to itself. Our own farmers’ groups kept warning about the shortsightedness, or sheer folly, of neglecting food production. Government would not listen, Arroyo least of all.
Today, we’re the biggest importer of rice in Asia – some say in the world. That is so notwithstanding that we introduced “miracle rice” to the world by way of the International Rice Research Institute. The scorn for food production has resulted in an alarming plunge in the number of Filipino farmers and farmlands over the last decade or so.
Can we still stave off the specter of hunger that looms on the country? Only if we massively subsidize food production, buying high (from farmers) and selling low (to consumers), which is going to take much, much more than P5 billion. One way to do that is by getting the crooks in government to return the money they stole from the nation, talk of economic sabotage, talk of making Juan de la Cruz hungry, talk of hanging the guilty from the nearest tree. But that is as likely to happen as Arroyo stepping down in 2010.
Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez says they won’t target or witch-hunt the Chinese in their anti-hoarding campaign but nonetheless confirmed the existence of a Chinese rice cartel. The example of Indonesia in 1998 says otherwise. As a result of the financial crisis of 1997, Indonesia, which had been doing fairly well up till then, found itself in dire straits. The International Monetary Fund, to whom it went for help, demanded that it set its financial house in order, not least by removing subsidies on oil and food. Suharto complied and almost overnight the prices of oil and rice soared. This triggered a series of riots in Jakarta, which were aimed at the Chinese. The reason for this being that government had been telling the public the Chinese were to blame for it, hoarding rice and manipulating prices as they did. More than 1,000 people died in the riots.
Rice prices soar in this country over the next few months, or worse rice disappears from shelves, and with all this talk of a cartel in Manila’s Chinatown area Binondo you’ll have more to worry about than being kidnapped if you’re Chinese.
The farmers’ groups have been demanding angrily that government tell the truth, if only for once in its life, about the rice crisis. That is not going to happen of course, but they have a point. If ever truth needed to be known about anything, it is about this. The rice crisis is a matter of life and death. — Conrado de Quiros, Inquirer
