Only two years from now, or by 2013, according to Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala, this country will enjoy “self-sufficiency” in its staple food – rice.
To top it all, our leader Benigno Simeon (a.k.a. BS), who is agog over “buko” as our new star product in the dog-eat-dog technology-driven export markets, apparently believes Alcala’s pronouncement.
Well, BS the Buko Vendor even gave Alcala’s target a special mention in his latest SONA. This country shall be self-sufficient in rice by 2013, or by 2016, which is the end of the BS reign. We should all jump for joy, I guess.
Perhaps to prove that we are well on the way to achieving his goal of self-sufficiency, Alcala even gives us this heartening bit of bravado: This country will only import 500,000 metric tons of rice this year.
For the sake of some comedians in Malacañang, let us recall that, in the last year of the cute administration of Gloriaetta, for instance, we imported about 2.5 million metric tons of rice.
Early this year, the NFA already declared that we would need more rice importation this year, if only to serve as buffer in case of bad weather. As chair of the NFA, the agriculture secretary did not waste any time berating the experts in the NFA.
Alcala at that time noted that the country had a good harvest in the summer of 2011, and thus we would we have no need for more importation. It did not occur to Alcala that the summer harvest was the result of good weather. The previous year in 2010, rice production dropped because of draught. Sufficient rain in early 2011 somehow brought up rice production.
More than anything, the increase in production was the result of luck. I mean, really, the agriculture department did not do anything extraordinary for the good harvest this year. It was mainly thanks to good weather.
And so the Aquino (Part II) administration did not bother to secure contracts for additional rice importation this year. Well, the secretary has the unequivocal support of BS, right?
Until of course “Pedring” and “Quiel” came along! Now we have a problem! We all know that rice is a political commodity. You never mess with rice supply. In other places, food shortage caused the fall of regimes.
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The agriculture secretary even took too lightly the effects of the two recent strong typhoons. He estimated the damage brought about by “Pedring,” for instance, at only 39,000 metric tons.
Such a fantasyland estimate, for the sake of the guys down here in my barangay, who are already stocking up on rice, worried about a possible shortage because of “Pedring” and “Quiel,” is not even 1 percent of all the rice we eat in a year.
In other words, to the gallant agriculture secretary, there should be no cause for alarm.
Alright, Alcala could just be trying to calm down the public. But the truth was far from what he wanted us to believe. For instance, the LGUs in Northern Luzon, from the mayors to the governors, with their regions reeling from those two strong typhoons, showed us a much worse scenario, backed up as they were by news photos of hectares upon hectares of flooded rice fields, as far as the eyes could see.
And this is a fact: The DA regional office in Central Luzon also came out with its own estimate of the damage from “Pedring” – just one typhoon, mind you – at some 350,000 metric tons of already maturing rice plants in the fields.
Worst of all, the weather guys from Pagasa are saying that we must expect a few more typhoons this year. We have not yet reached our quota of destructive weather for the year.
And here we have our heroic agriculture secretary, proclaiming proudly that despite the destructive typhoons and all, we will have rice on our tables. How? I am afraid we will need a miracle.
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In this country, self-sufficiency in rice may be a favorite fantasy, but it is hard to achieve—at least not in the short term, as Alcala would want our leader BS to believe.
In fact, Congress wanted to find out if, indeed, we could achieve the target set by BS in his SONA, as inspired by Alcala, and so the congressional oversight committee on agriculture formed a task force to evaluate our chances for self-sufficiency in 2013.
In the task force was former UP Los Baños chancellor Emil Javier, who also used to head the Department of Science and Technology, together with stalwarts in the agriculture sector, such as the FFI head Raul Montemayor.
Here let me quote part of the report of the task force:
“The target of achieving rice self-sufficiency by 2013—i.e. increasing palay production by an additional 5.35 million tons per year between 2010 and 2013—is over-optimistic and in our opinion unlikely to be attained.
“Rice self-sufficiency by 2016, the end of the Aquino administration, is more plausible although still very ambitious.
“This would require attaining a palay production growth rate of 7.10 percent per annum versus the historical growth rate of 3.47 percent per annum.”
Our highest ever growth rate in rice production came about during the martial law years in the early 1970s, under the Masagana 99 program, which hit a record of 5.6 percent yearly growth rate. And that was it. The growth rate in the 1980s went down to 2.2 percent.
In the 1990s, during the time of former President Fidel “Kuya Eddie” Ramos, we had a terrible rice shortage, with the delivery trucks of the NFA even attacked by the public. Blame was laid on the “rice cartel” in Binondo of course, not the poor growth rate in production.
During the due administration of Gloriaetta, the growth rate reached an average of 2.6 percent a year, despite all the money spent on fertilizer subsidies and all that.
Under the Aquino (Part II) administration, we are being made to believe that the growth rate will increase to more than 7 percent a year, or more than double the average rate in the past four decades.
Who believes that, anyway?