Saturday, April 19, 2008 Carvajal: Ominous silence By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
INTRIGUING might better describe it, but I find the silence of the Senate on the rice issue strangely ominous. The scarcity of rice is a much bigger sin of this administration than the NBN scam. This does not hit the masses where it hurts the most, in the pit of their stomachs but the rice issue does. Neither does broadband have the potential for nightmarish food riots but rice has.
Why do you think armed troops guard the sale of cheap NFA rice?
Because the rice issue is much more explosive, you would expect the Senate to turn its investigative guns and grandstanding instincts to it. Because the opposition in the Senate is not making any headway in their effort to use the NBN scam to agitate the people to oust the President, you would think they would find the rice scandal a better tool for agitation. But no, all we are getting so far is a deafening silence and we can only wonder why.
Also, the scarcity of rice presents the opposition with a golden opportunity to resurrect the issue of the fertilizer funds that disappeared in the pile of sample ballots and election propaganda materials. The rice farmer’s inability to access cheap fertilizers at least partly explains his low productivity that comes to a head in scarcity of national proportions. So, why is the opposition in the Senate not searching for the truth on the fertilizer scam?
Even if the scarcity of rice is global in scope, our local scarcity of this staple does not have a global explanation. I think it safe to presume the local portion of the global scarcity of rice can be blamed on the incompetence and corruption of another government department, this time the Department of Agriculture, and of another government agency, the National Food authority (NFA).
The government now is going after the hoarders. But what allowed hoarding in the first place if not the incompetence and corruption of concerned government agencies?
The government, moreover, is allocating billions of pesos to import rice and to build the infrastructure for rice sufficiency in the long term. But what happened to previous years’ budgets for rice importation and rice production?
There are just two many questions that need to be answered by this administration on why we have arrived at a point of scarcity when we had all that money. Remember what President Arroyo said after the implementation of the E-Vat, “Now we have the money.” So, where did all that money go?
Why was it not used to prevent the scarcity we are experiencing now?
So, why can’t the Senate help us get the answers? Are the senators protecting hoarders or political protégées in the Department of Agriculture, in the NFA and in the Bureau of Customs? If not, then why are they so ominously silent?
