Wednesday, April 30, 2008 Arroyo endorses eating of 'saksak' as substitute for rice
PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on Monday night endorsed the use of "saksak" or rice cooked with camote (sweet potato) as extender to lessen the country's heavy dependence on rice.
Arroyo, in an after-dinner chat in Cebu with reporters covering the launching of the new central seaboard roll-on roll-off (Roro) ferry route, said the practice was shared by Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia during the local peace and security meeting.
"This is good. Precisely, one of the means that can reduce the burden of the global rise in the prices of rice is to have substitutes. This is an extender," she said.
"The campaign really is to have substitutes, to get the Philippines to be less exclusively dependent on rice," she added.
Garcia said the practice is very feasible because it only takes three months to propagate camote. She recalled that her father, former Cebu governor now Representative Pablo Garcia, would cook it during World War II when rice became very expensive.
She said the Cebuanos are being encouraged to eat saksak by having contests in their respective barangays.
She said the Cebu Provincial Government is promoting its use by serving in it functions at the Capitol. But she was quick to add that the people are not being told to stop eating rice.
"It's a matter of getting used to," said Cebu Representative Antonio Cuenco.
Arroyo said on May 2, she will attend an event of the International Rice Research Institute (Irri) and that a master plan would be presented not only to the Philippines but also to other rice-producing countries.
She said she has also asked Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap to attend an event of the Food and Agriculture Organization in June in Rome.
She said the Philippines is not being overly optimistic about being able to weather the global rice crisis better than other countries. "This is a once-a-millennium global crisis. We have an action plan," she added.
The President admitted that it would take the Philippines "five years at the very least" to be self-sufficient because it would need farm-to-market roads, seeds and new practices.
Meanwhile, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) reported an increase in the number of families living below the P5,000 per month poverty threshold resulting in the delay in the implementation of the Family Access Cards (FACs) and the eventual pullout of the P18.25 per kilo government-subsidized rice from the public markets.
Social Welfare Secretary Esperanza Cabral said they are now targeting 706,939 poor families from 789 barangays from the 16 cities and one municipality of Metro Manila. Malacañang last week said they are initially targeting a little over 600,000 poor families for the program.
An increase in the number of family-beneficiaries were reported mostly in Malabon with an increase of 3,369; Navotas with an increase of 8,956; and Pateros with 992 families more based on their April 25, 2008 report that stemmed from the assessment process conducted at the barangay level.
Most of the 16 cities and one municipality in the National Capital Region (NCR) are asking for more time to complete their lists of the beneficiaries from FACs.
Cabral met Monday with the Metro Manila mayors following a delay in their submission of the beneficiary list. She said the DSWD has about 250 staff going around the metropolis to verify and ensure that those included in the initial master list are accurate.
She said that so far, the local government units (LGUs) of Pasig with 92 percent, Pateros with 87 percent and San Juan with 73 percent are leading the assessment and identification process resulting in an aggregate number of 38,085 identified family-beneficiaries. San Juan City, however, has held in abeyance their verification pending a scheduled demolition of families in some target barangays.
"We urged the LGUs to fast-track the identification and assessment of the families included in the list so the DSWD, in turn, can validate these," she added. (JMR/Sunnex)
