Food picture 1995

Organization, consolidation, planning, management: these are not our strong points as a people. We lack a forward, future view. We do not care for anticipation, originality of approach, ingenuity. We don't talk about global issues until they stare us in the face, or on TV and the Internet. We are not only insular in orientation, we also do not care for full-scale, full-time study and specialization.

If we expect doctors to devote their whole lives to continuing study in their specialized fields, why shouldn't we demand the same from economists, government administrators, public officials, urban planners, scientists, academicians, and everybody else--including industrialists and capitalists--with a responsibility toward the efficient running of the various threads of national life?

And don't we have the right to demand that if they fail to measure up, then they should be exposed for the lightweights that they are and immediately dismissed?

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Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 21 August 1995

First came the pork crisis, followed by the rice shortage. Then, problems with sugar and bangus fry. Now, we're getting warnings about a future shortage of cattle stock.

There's also red tide in our seas, pollution in our lakes and bays. For a while, vegetables were reported to be laced with formalin. Price controls were imposed on basic necessities as prices rose. Will our food problems never cease?

Remember that importing is a palliative, and a costly one at that, depriving us of substantial foreign exchange and driving the wedge of fear into the hearts of local manufacturers, who will be pursued by nightmares till the dawn of global free (not to be equated with fair) trade.

So the government is run off its feet trying to douse brush fires as and where they ignite. Senators storm rice warehouses, mobile stores sell cheap rice to kilometer-long queues, and politicians have a field day getting "shot" for the front pages of the dailies while dispensing NFA rice.

The government has now started daily nationwide inventories of basic goods, while the private sector does its own thing by sending out volunteers to do price monitoring.

With President Fidel V. Ramos out of the country, his justice secretary, Teofisto Guingona, has ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to look into a possible collusion between the National Food Authority and members of the country's rice cartel, the existence of which everybody (except perhaps Agriculture Secretary Roberto Sebastian and NFA Chairman Romeo David) knows.

Will somebody please provide us all with true, real, and authoritative national food production and consumption figures for the whole of the Philippines for 1994 and 1995? And has the government projected food production and consumption versus population, at least for the immediate years to come?

Or will 1996 and the rest of our future, just like our food picture circa 1995, be left to the far from tender mercies of the usual suspects: unplanned growth, unprepared development, uninformed bureaucrats?

-- NBT