Which do you prefer: rice sufficiency or food security?
I am right now reading 2 documents: “Reviewing Rice Tariffication In The Time Of COVID-19: Rationale And Road To Rice Self-Sufficiency In The Philippines[1],” which is a very long report by David Michael Marcelino San Juan, uploaded 18 April 2020, some 5,500 words (text only); and “DOF Usec: ‘Agriculture Has To Grow, Or Else, We Cannot Feed Our Own People[2]’”, a very short news item by Gabriela Baron, published 07 August 2019, only 270 words. About 8 months apart, they are talking about the same subject: rice sufficiency.
The author of the long paper misses the point – and so does the subject of the very short news item! The very title of the long paper has the term “Rice Self-Sufficiency.” The title of the short one implies it; in fact, the expert cited, Department of Finance Undersecretary Karl Kendrick Chua (image above) is talking about the Rice Tariffication Law, RTL, saying:
Population growth is 1 percent every year, that is two million additional Filipinos, so agriculture has to grow by at least 1.6 percent, preferably 2 percent or more, otherwise we cannot feed our own people and we will be relying on imports and the price will go up.
Mr San Juan and Mr Chua I am sure they are both knowledgeable, but neither of them is considering another option other than rice sufficiency! (I cannot blame Mr Chua because he was talking only 2 days after William Dar/Manong Willie was appointed Secretary of Agriculture by President Rodrigo Duterte, and so he may not have been aware Manong Willie was after food security as part of his “The New Thinking for Agriculture.”
I call the same error of those gentlemen as “missing the other forest because of the other trees.”
I must emphasize here that the 2 gentlemen miss the same big point: food security!
If we follow the policy of food sufficiency, the Philippines will produce all our foods, all of them and in sufficient quantities, and not buy or import from any country.
If we follow the policy of food security, the Philippines will produce as much of the foods we can, where we enjoy economic advantage, not rice, but such as coconut and sugarcane. Then we import from Vietnam or Thailand the additional rice that we need. We have dollars to import the rice we need.
Why is Secretary of Agriculture William Dar/Manong Willie not pursuing the policy of rice sufficiency like his predecessor Emmanuel Piñol? Because Mr Piñol, like all Manong Willie’s predecessors, all 44 of them, failed to achieve rice sufficiency. Because our farmers are very, very expensive rice growers. Today, PH rice costs P12/kilo to produce while Vietnam costs only P6/kilo!
Of course, it is conceivable that new or improved science can bring down the cost of PH rice to even lower than P6/kilo, but that will not be tomorrow or the next day.
In the meanwhile, we Filipinos have to eat rice morning, noon, and nighttime too!@517
[1]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340738836
[2]https://news.mb.com.ph/2019/08/07/dof-usec-agriculture-has-to-grow-or-else-we-cannot-feed-our-own-people/
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