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

Self-sufficiency in food

Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 15 January 1996

It says a lot about our priorities and values, the fact that the front pages of yesterday's morning dailies were dominated by huge photos of the returning half of a controversial, much-publicized, troubled coupling.

Buried in the inside pages and meriting no pictorial support whatsoever were snippets of news--reluctant coverage, one can almost feel--about government efforts to boost food production and avert a possible national food shortage in our immediate future.

In a struggle between food and tsismis, it is clear which one enjoys the distinct advantage, one unhappily supported, even fueled, by media. Is it already carved into the national soul and ingrained in our national mind--this preference for make-believe over reality, for showbiz over economics, for form over substance?

Maybe this explains why, even on the big screen, when we play out our fantasies, the cinematic creations that draw the crowds and bring in the money are not necessarily the ones that win the awards. But that, surely, is a subject worthy of another editorial.

For now, let us point out the intense activity going on in the area of agricultural development and food production. Late such intensity may be, after our countrymen had already spent a considerable part of last year lining up for imported rice or forking out more money than they should really be paying for every dining table's staple food.

It may be that people in government have finally realized that, other than merely being an occasion for changing the personalities at the helm of the country's food-supply chain, the repetition of a similar situation in the very near future may well lead to collapse of popular support.

The food-supply question is therefore being given the kind and amount of attention it has never gotten before. And about time, too. The Department of Budget and Management is releasing funds to finance increased irrigation and water impounding. Support projects like multi-drying and farm-to-market infrastructure will be receiving separate allocations. Food-producing regions hit hard by last year's series of killer typhoons will be rehabilitated. Thankfully, both government and private agencies dedicated to research and development in agriculture and agribusiness are also ready to contribute their efforts toward securing adequate food supply for the country.

We hope these efforts--which, by the way, still fall short of a comprehensive handle on the whole issue--at least point to one direction: that government is finally weaning itself, however slowly, from the idea of importation as the inevitable cure-all to our food problems. Those who have been following the global food picture know that in the next millennium, food will not only be in short supply on a worldwide basis, it will also be expensive.

Only food self-sufficiency will help us escape the specter of hunger and disorder in the future.

-- NBT