Saturday, April 12, 2008
Arroyo warned on rice crisis
“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.
Rice, Church and State
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.
Rice queue nightmare
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.
Looming burden for consumers
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.Harvest of wrath
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. Friday, April 11, 2008
THE WAR, a seven-part series directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of a handful of men and women from four quintessentially American towns. This exclusive, revelatory "first look" at THE WAR and its creation provides excerpts from the series, insights from the on-screen participants, behind-the-scenes looks at the production and thoughts from co-producers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on the critical importance of creating this series at this time. During the preview, you'll see some of the work that went into making the seven-part documentary about World War II. Excerpts are introduced by interview footage of the filmmakers or participants in the film. For more information, visit http://www.pbs.org/thewar
Middlesex is a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. It was published in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003. On June 5, 2007, Oprah Winfrey announced that the novel would be the summer 2007 selection for Oprah's Book Club. The narrator and protagonist, Calliope Stephanides (later called "Cal"), an intersexed person of Greek descent, has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. The bulk of the novel is devoted to telling his coming-of-age story growing up in Detroit, Michigan in the late 20th century. This story, however, is intertwined with elements of a family saga, meditations on the era's zeitgeist and bits of contemporary history.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
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Tuesday, April 8, 2008
My Friday visits at Rookie are ended when I saw him talking sweetly to his girl neighbor. After that incident, I’d convinced my family to give the dog to Rookie to stop us from going to their place anymore. That was the saddest of growing up; the feeling of emptiness after something habitual was untaken. It was pain in the most personal kind. And it took time to unbreak my heart. I’d engaged myself full time with my studies and disco, since around that time it was the craze thing to do during the weekends.
I Will Survive is a song first performed by Gloria Gaynor, released in October 1978. It was written by Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris. The song's lyrics describe a narrator who finds personal strength while recovering from a break-up; it has often been used as an anthem of female empowerment, a gay anthem, and later on HIV/AIDS awareness--and is a firm favorite on the karaoke circuit. It is one of the most famous disco songs of all time, and easily Gaynor's biggest hit; it received massive airplay in 1979, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, also in the UK the next day. The song was originally released as the B-side to a Gaynor song called Substitute, a track thought to have more potential for mainstream success by her record label. Disc jockeys began flipping the single over and eventually copies of the record were pressed with I Will Survive as the A-side (Substitute managed to peak at No. 107 on Billboard's Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart). The song was rated No. 9 on George Carlin's 10 Most Embarrassing Songs of All Time. It received the Grammy Award for Best Disco Recording in 1980, the only year that the award was given. It is ranked No. 489 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
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