Monday, April 14, 2008 Sumog-oy: Solving the rice puzzle By Ben Sumog-oy Issues and Views
THE much-ballyhooed rice crisis has thrown the entire nation into growing panic. Strangely enough, whenever National Government officials publicly guarantee sufficiency of rice supply, the more that the people become panicky.
Thus, it appears that the problem is not really the rice crisis but the crisis of credibility; but that is another story.
Whatever it is, the truth remains that the people had already become frantic and the chills engulf the whole country; Socsksargen is no exception.
Local NFA authorities quickly allayed the people's fear by publicly showing the gigantic piles of rice in various warehouses located within Socsksargen.
The City Government, headed by City Mayor Pedro B. Acharon Jr., after series of consultation with various stakeholders, effected the immediate ocular inspections of warehouses to deter possible rice hoarding.
Representative Darlene R. Antonino-Custodio wasted no time in linking with various entities, public and private, to get assurance of adequate rice supply for her district, if the rice crisis bursts into alarming proportion.
Sarangani Governor Migs Dominguez publicly came out to deny that there is such crisis and made public assurance that, if indeed there is, the province has had enough foods to feed its people.
Lastly, South Cotabato Governor Daisy Avance-Fuentes twitted Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for deliberately creating an artificial rice crisis to deviate the people's attention away from the controversial ZTE-NBN (national broadband network) deal.
Artificial or not, the rice crisis, or the serious fears for it, is shaking the foundation of our society. Every well-meaning citizen has the duty, then, to help solve the puzzle that warps the many issues surrounding this problem.
The food debate in this country has been raging for so many years now. The bone of contention is always between food security and access to foods.
Food access, unlike the food security framework, is a concept that does not impose self-sufficiency in foods as the indispensable task of the domestic agricultural industry.
In fact, under this concept, agricultural lands could be used for non-food ventures under a climate that guarantees unhampered importation of food products.
As it turns out, if the rice crisis is true, the government has seriously erred in making food access as a national framework concerning the country's food industry.
Again, granting that it is true, the rice crisis should have been abated had the government nurtured the country's domestic agricultural industry so as to make it wholly responsive to the food needs of its population.
If the crisis really exists, the whole nation suffers the brunt of the government's policy to put our domestic food industry under the stranglehold of foreign powers. We will not even be surprised if our country will soon emerge to be a hapless puppet of food-producing nations, like Japan, China, the US and, even, Vietnam.
After all, a government that cannot afford to feed its people can easily submit to the whims and caprices of nations that provide foods to its constituencies; lest, it falls victim to the savage fury of its hungry people.
Sadly, the rice crisis, if true, is not simply a mistake in government policy. We suspect that the making of this crisis is a part of an old plot to liberalize the country's agricultural industry, in consonance with the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (IMF/WB).
The World Trade Organization (WTO), for its part, tried to forge a consensus for the liberalization of our agricultural industry during its ministerial meetings in Seattle and Hong Kong but the move was aborted when the people became uncontrollably riotous.
Today, it is becoming clear - and this is our dominant thesis - that the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo regime had deliberately created this artificial rice crisis to please the United States, which is now suffering from an economic recession. Providing the US vast markets for its rice surplus will help enliven its national economy.
Lastly, if Gloria thinks that she had succeeded in her scheme to defraud the people, she is mistaken. She had actually treaded on dangerous ground by making this sensitive political commodity as an object for her playing footsie with vested interest groups.
For all we know, this can still become her administration's tipping point! (Blog: bensumogoy.wordpress.com)
