Monday, April 07, 2008 Editorial: Food, glorious food
PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's chest was all puffed up as she announced several commitments of her government to encourage farmers to up their harvest during the Food Summit held in Pampanga last week.
The commitments were listed down as follows: P500 million for fertilizer support and production; P6 billion per year for large and small irrigation systems; P6 billion per year for farm-to-market roads and Roll-On-Roll-Off ports; P5 billion for research and development, capacity building, and improving educational efforts for the agriculture and fisheries sector; P2 billion for hybrid seeds (for the remaining five planting seasons, up to 2010); P6 billion for certified seeds (also up to 2010); P2 billion for dryers and other post-harvest facilities; P15 billion for agricultural loans to farmers, most of which will be coursed through Landbank.
These commitments answer the six important components of food production: fertilizers, infrastructure and irrigation, extension and education, loans, drying and other post-harvest facilities, and seeds.
But what about the land?
While there may be fertilizers made available, this can only do a little to alleviate what can already be a poisoned land; a small piece of land surrounded in all sides by plantations of cash crops for exports; a small piece of land deprived of its natural ecosystem to provide lush harvest because its watersheds and mountains are already being mined by foreigners.
All these, with the blessings of a government who has perfected the craft of double-talk and cannot seem to understand that everything that has to do with the land are all interrelated. One cannot espouse mining industry boom and still believe you can produce enough food for everyone by 2008.
One cannot encourage crops for biofuels production and yet believe that the promises of billions of pesos for fertilizers, irrigations, seeds, and stuff will stop poor farmers from selling their land to big companies lusting over these properties because of the potentials of biofuels.
One cannot continue to hide behind rhetoric to hide hunger among a fast-growing population. Somehow, the food crisis and the promises of multi-billion pesos for agricultural development point to the fact that government policies, to this very date, do not have the vision of providing real food security for its people.
Government should go beyond computing food sufficiency and security as having food available in the market for the whole population. Common sense dictates that food sufficiency and security is all about food on the table and not in metric tonnes divided by total population. But until government becomes sincere in serving the people, it will continue to promise billions while giving away the country's prime lands to foreign investors who can never care less if the squatter in Tondo starves as they sluice down the lush soil and cut down the forests in Mindanao for minerals, or to multi-million corporations producing jatropha, bananas, pineapples, solo papayas, and stuff that the poor will never get a taste of.
