THERE is a saying about selling our furniture just to be able to put food on the table.
That might sound like a contradiction, because if we sell our furniture, we may no longer have a table to put our food on.
The situation is worst for some poor families, because they do not have any furniture to sell, even if they are hungry and they have no money to buy food. Fortunately, most of our families are still able to buy food one way or the other, without resorting to the extreme of selling their furniture.
The quality of the food that they are eating is another issue, but at least they are able to buy food in order to prevent hunger.
The situation of our food supply in the national level is somehow different. We are importing a huge portion of our food supplies, to an extent that we are making the farmers of other countries rich, while our own farmers remain poor.
Not only that, we are remitting so much of our dollar reserves, money that could have been used here to fund our own production, an activity that would have gotten more of our people out of poverty. One way or the other, our outward dollar remittances are affecting out dollar exchange rate, in a way that prevents our economy from growing as much as we want to.
In the same way that we are eating our way into poverty, we could reverse the process, so that we could instead eat our way out of poverty. The key to this is to eat local, meaning to say locally produced food.
The logic for this is really very simple. Since we are going to eat anyway whether we like it or not, we might as well eat locally produced food, so that we could keep the money that we spend within our own economy, rather than sending out the money to the other countries to make their economies richer as ever. Most of us do not even realize that aside from importing rice, we are also importing almost all of our flour and almost all of our milk, among many other food commodities.
The story is slightly different when it comes to hogs and poultry, particularly in the case of broiler chicken. When we eat pork chops and fried chickens, we might be thinking that these are locally produced food, if and when they are grown here.
The truth is, they may be grown here, but they are actually eating imported food. In that sense, it could be said that we are eating imported pork and chicken. The reason for that is that at least half of the ingredients that go into the manufacturing of hog and poultry feeds are imported, such as soybean meal, fish meal and meat and bone meal. It is difficult to imagine why we could not grow these ingredients ourselves, considering that we are supposed to be an agricultural country.
Believe it or not, we are also importing much of our beef, pork and chicken, as if we could not produce these food items ourselves. What makes this worst is that we have no way of knowing anymore whether they are imported or not, once these are processed into canned or frozen foods.
In particular, many of the hotels are using only imported pork, seemingly because they could not get the quality that they are looking for, in terms of being leaner and softer. Of course, we could not blame these hotels for making their quality choices, but this is an opportunity that we could tap, if only our local farmers could match the quality of these imported foods.
An American friend of mine told me that if we grow hogs here using the same breeds from abroad and if we feed them with the same diet as they do in the United States, we would produce the same quality of pork, as we are importing it now.
Another American friend told me that if we grow tomatoes here using the same strains that they are using abroad, and if we will culture it in the same way that they do, we could harvest exactly the same quality. These two friends appear to know what they are saying, and it would make a lot of sense to try out what they are saying.
Making bread out of imported flour is yet another issue. As far as most of us could remember, we have been making bread out of flour made from imported wheat, even if it is already generally known that bread could be made out of other flours made from other materials such as local root crops, fruits, grains, coconut meat, and even leaves.
As a matter of fact, some local bakery chains are already selling bread mixed with moringa (malunggay) leaves. Cassava (tapioca), sweet potatoes (kamote), carrots, and gabi (taro) are some of the root crops that could be used to make alternative flours.
We may not be selling our furniture just to buy food, but we are actually doing worst than that, because we are already “selling” our manpower to the other countries just to save our economy, perhaps to prevent our country from going hungry.
There is no denying that the remittance of these Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) is the one saving our economy, and that is the reason why we now call them our new economic heroes. The big irony, however, is that as they are sending in their dollar remittances, we are also sending out these dollars as we are paying the farmers and the exporters of these imported food items who are based in the foreign countries.
Since no one seems to be saying this now, I want to say now perhaps for the first time that local food production should start at the provincial level, wherein each province should produce its own food, and be responsible for their own food security. There is no problem with technology either, because we have experts who could guide us in growing and culturing any food item that you could imagine.
In theory, every province would be capable of producing their food, and ensuring their own food security. Whatever it is that one province could not produce; they could trade with other provinces that have surpluses of certain food items./PN
