Tuesday, October 21, 2008 Editorial: Making sense of it all
LAND Bank of the Philippines in Southern Mindanao has earmarked P707 million for this year to ensure the rice production of Davao region and the provinces of Agusan del Sur and Surigao del Sur, a report published by Sun.Star Davao Monday said. Of this amount, it said, P150-million has already been released for the first cropping season this year.
And we say, if only this has reached those people who need them most; the farm folks are most affected by all the crises that we are going through.
But that would be wishful thinking especially when the money is coming from a government that cannot even send its police generals to attend an international police conference without getting in trouble with foreign immigration authorities for having too much money.
Indeed, its reports like these that push people's distrust even higher, so high, such that declarations of higher spending for agriculture are always met with disbelief. What with the fertilizer scam that until now has not been resolved and the guilty ones still out there enjoying the good life, while the kin of the whistleblower will be celebrating another death anniversary in five months' time.
Worse, while millions upon millions are being released, there has been no apparent and transparent effort by government to gather data on the impact of food prices on the poor people.
What with government always denying that there are people living way below poverty line, and that they can number to millions.
Without such a study, there can never be rational and logical policy responses beyond releases of more millions in the hope that a few million will hit the target.
Indeed major humanitarian assistance have been set up, and subsidies too, but more has to be done because the problem is about food security and agricultural production. Meaning, the solution is in food security and agricultural production, not in humanitarian assistance and subsidies.
We cannot forever stagger from crisis after crisis -- global food prices, fuel prices, global markets, and local Moro and communist rebels' offensives... The crises are there, they are already a fixture.
Thus, responses should be those that help put everything in order. While indeed there seem to be a lot of crises, there is one underlying crisis that complicates all these -- poverty, more particularly food insecurity. The recent experiences of the rice crisis and the melamine in milk crisis show that we stand a better chance of providing for our people by focusing on our own production.
The response should thus be towards a food and agriculture system that can cope with even the worst-case scenarios -- like a major war in Central Mindanao where a substantial portion of our rice harvests are coming from that will lead to an unexpected decrease in supply, to a scenario where there might be a glut of cheap goods because of a world in recession.
Without such, nothing can ever come out from all these crisis and we will just end up spending more in emergency humanitarian assistance and subsidies on people who are paralyzed into inaction by poverty or war or unfair competition.
