I WAS listening to Albay Representative Joey Salceda yesterday, and he seemed like the light at the end of the tunnel to look for ways to ease our people, especially the poor, from the unnecessary onslaught of spiralling food prices.
He says, basically, it is a problem of our own making. In other words, we simply shot ourselves in the foot.
He has two suggestions full of practical and Biblical wisdom, and this government will do no wrong if it listened to him, or better yet, included in the economic team of this administration.
On inflation, Salceda reminds all and sundry, that we reap what we sow. That's Biblical. Translation: we only have ourselves to blame for inflicting it upon ourselves. And the way it goes by the headlines, our economic managers appear to look at the rear view mirror and show off with their 20/20 vision.
Salceda's solution: review and cut taxes, especially those on food, even remove the tax on food as far and soon possible ,to alleviate the old poor and the new hungry from the pains of the pocket and the stomach.
The TRAIN Law, for instance. In a nutshell, this government wants to have more money with which to pay its many projects, mostly infra, and sooner, not later. It's like a father wanting to build a second floor, pronto, on the house even if it means less food on the table for the children.
If that is not wrong priority, I don't know what is.
On agriculture, Salceda is quotable: You cannot harvest what you did not plant. Ha ha.
The way we are, and it is conceded by the brightest guy in town, we're lousy, food farming wise. His advice is to lower the cost of the farmers' production cost, build impounding the dams, not the big-ticket, and other measures what will help the farmers make more, not less, money from their produce.
It doesn't sound like it came from a rocket scientist.
My father was a farmer and until the day he died, he was most of the time on the shorter end of his livelihood. I remember, he would bring home the sacks of palay after harvest to stay overnight in our house only for creditors to haul it all off the next. My old man wanted to have his psychic reward, more than financial. Year in and year out, it was a dead end for him, no pun intended.
He always had problems with irrigation, with fertilizer cost and other farm inputs. Vietnam, reports say, has built kilometric irrigation systems to make water available to all farmers throughout the country. And look where it is now, a major rice exporter. I'm not sure if it has sent its technocrats to the IRRI in Los Baños, Laguna. When I was in the US in the 90s, I once passed by an irrigation canal that seemed without end in California. On both sides of the canal, were farms of various products.
Rice shortage in this country should not happen. We have lots of sun here, which the rice plant needs the most. Photoperiodism, I remember from my high school subject in rice farming. We have lots of rain, too, given the floodings that we have had since time immemorial. Something must be wrong.
And Salceda sounds like he has the clue.
For the sake of sanity, Salceda is suggesting this government can try common sense, which my boss suspects is in short supply or uncommon in a country of Ivy League braggarts.