Memoires of Another Kind

“Rice is an extremely sensitive political commodity. Pres. Arroyo said there was no rice shortage “because that is a physical phenomenon where people line up on the streets to buy rice.” At P30 per kilo, the government’s latest rice purchase cost more than 60 percent of the National Food Authority’s subsidized price of P18.25 per kilo. Ample supply is the surest way for us to ward off higher rice prices as well as broader consumer price increases that may be associated with rice price inflation. “While declaring that we have no rice shortage, Pres. Arroyo said prices would increase. Sen. Roxas urged the government to treat the rice problem as a calamity and release emergency funds to avert a crisis.

Sen. Legarda said the NFA rice subsidies were not sustainable in the wake of spiraling rice prices in the world market and that this would encourage the diversion of the subsidized rice to the retail market by unscrupulous traders. She cited the decision of the world’s biggest rice exporter, Thailand, to control rigorously foreign sales to secure its own needs; China’s move to start importing rice due to a major local shortage, and the decline in rice output growth in Asia—the world’s rice basket—to an annual average of just 1.1 percent in recent years versus 2.7 percent in the 1970s as the key factors that had precipitated the global rice shortfall. Annual subsidies “are not sustainable, not when rice prices are as high as they are overseas,” Sen. Legarda said.

The lack of collective concern for the constant threat of hunger that confronts a poor family daily has shocked and saddened me no end. I know that there is a social action arm in most religious organizations, but I cannot but accept that intervention against hunger in particular and poverty in general is nowhere proportionate to the actual need of the poor and hungry and the demands of the Christian faith.

This preponderance of religious information, however, matches badly against actual reality. The Christian path starts with the mission of Jesus, a mission with primary focus on the poor, the weak, the oppressed and the sick. Filipino Christians have fared badly in their journey of faith if the collective expression and action against poverty and hunger is basis to assess Christian behavior. I have been monitoring visible responses to the state of massive poverty and the daily threat of hunger to the poor. Thank God, then, for the rice and food crisis that looms. Divine intervention suddenly awakens a nation, its government, its corporations, its churches—including the Catholic Church. Poor Filipinos will now troop to parish centers to buy subsidized rice even when they do not troop to churches in the same number every Sunday. There can hardly be a more effective move to cement relationships between the Catholic Church and the political leadership of a nation characterized, in the words of Church leaders, by a "cancer of corruption."

The Church and the State are not strange bedfellows. A rice and food crisis is a singular opportunity to learn our lessons, why we have shortages and why Filipinos are forced to go hungry.

All of a sudden, rice queues have appeared at National Food Authority (NFA) outlets that sell the staple of 90 million Filipinos at the subsidized government price of P18.25 a kilo. Unlike previous administrations, which had experienced rice crises, the incumbent has dug deepest into its arsenal of responses to a food emergency, ranging from throwing money into massive rice importation and using its police powers to stop hoarding of rice and profiteering (but not yet price control). It hopes to avert the spectacle of hungry mobs marching in the streets, demanding cheap rice.

Most recently, the Department of Justice created an Anti-Rice-Hoarding Task Force targeting “unscrupulous rice traders for acts inimical to public interest.” It threatened to charge traders found hoarding rice with economic sabotage and plunder, which carries a life sentence. These “unscrupulous rice traders” are mostly members of the Chinese rice cartels, the traditional targets of crackdowns on hoarding and profiteering.

This crackdown mirrors the police-state mentality of the Arroyo administration and does not contribute to an increase in the rice supply or address the problems that lie behind the recurring rice supply deficits in the Philippines.

The Philippines is the largest rice importer in the world. At the food summit in Clark a week ago, the President pledged to allocate P43.7 billion for a rice production program that would “ensure abundant, affordable and accessible” food supply.

The NFA is planning to increase the selling price of government subsidized rice (NFA rice), according to reports.

The KMP gathered a small crowd to protest the planned price increase. In a statement, KMP president Ka Paeng Mariano said that the group was opposing the proposed increase in the price of NFA rice and Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez’s proposal for Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to declare a “rice emergency.” The solution, said Mariano, would be to impose rice price controls and to increase procurement of rice by the NFA.

Some observers have pointed out that the rice scarcity has allowed Pres. Arroyo to divert public attention from the corruption scandals besetting her administration. The least effective measure the administration can use to combat the rice deficit and the skyrocketing rice prices is police action, which seems to the weapon of choice, to stop rice hoarding and profiteering.

The rice deficit and prices present the most exacting challenge yet to Pres. Arroyo’s crisis management skills and reserves. The old approaches have been taken out of the shelves and dusted off—including massive rice importation to fill the domestic production shortfalls, monopoly of subsidized rice sale by the NFA, and new commitment of money to increase rice production on short notice. For every move the government makes to head off the unrest in the streets over rice prices, there are costs to pay, whether it is massive importation of rice, allowing the private sector to import rice, not leaving the import entirely to the NFA, cutting by half the tariff on rice imports, or raising the price of government-subsidized rice (at P18.24 a kilogram), to provide incentives to local rice producers and also to reduce its huge losses on the subsidies. You make happy the rice producers, you make angry the consumers—mainly the poor who comprise 60 percent of the beneficiaries of NFA rice. Commercial rice, not NFA rice, is the catalyst.