BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
Unable to grow enough rice for its needs, the Philippines imports $1.63 billion dollar worth of rice annually, mostly from Vietnam (US$1.38B), Thailand (US$71M), Pakistan ($53M) and India (US$32M). If it is true that we are what we eat, then Filipinos are truly Asians.
The rich importers with government approval and licenses grow richer while the Filipinos grow poorer and hungrier. The dictators of the food supply bring hunger to almost 17 million Filipinos. The shameful truth is that this nation cannot feed itself. The Philippines is the second biggest rice importer in the world and rice is the 13th most imported product into the Philippines.
If ever there is war over Taiwan and shipping lanes in the South China Sea and West Philippine Sea are blocked for even a month or more, the Philippines would starve without rice imports. How about Japan, will they starve? No, because the Japanese have a phobia about hunger. They grow rice on only 1.7 million ha of rice paddies and produce 7.45 million metric tons of rice as of February 2024 statistics.
Japan has reached the level of 99 percent self-sufficiency in rice production. Considering that 80 percent of Japan’s landmass is actually mountains, that is a stunning achievement feeding a population of 124.60 million Japanese people.
The Philippines, with five million hectares of land nationwide, produced about 20 million metric tons of rice in 2022 for a population lower than Japan at 115 million Filipinos. Yet, due to exports, it is far from self-sufficiency in rice unlike its Asian neighbors. Why is that allowed to happen, a cabal of rice traders control and profit from the rice supply, and 115 million unknowing and silent Filipinos suffer super high prices for rice?
Indigenous peoples are subsistence farmers, that is, they and their families survive by consuming all they grow. If they have a surplus and they don’t own a market stall, they must sell to the local traders for a low price. There are 2.4 million farmers in the Philippines and 30 percent are poor, says the Philippine Statistics Authority. That is 720,000 impoverished agriculture workers. Subsistence farmers live above the hunger margin but when there is a climate disaster, they can fall below it as crops fail due to floods or drought.
The mining industry in the Philippines continues to expand with 38 new corporations registered and approved, with 103 more in waiting. Many are expanding into ancestral lands with government approval.
The military is deployed to quell protests by the indigenous people when mining corporations move in and go digging up forests and polluting rivers. Community leaders and workers and environmentalists are frequently harassed, threatened and even killed, especially when indigenous leaders refuse to sign away their people’s ancestral land rights. This is likely the reason why the government has stopped awarding Ancestral Domain Titles to the indigenous people.
Let all good people stand together for social justice in action and do good and oppose evil, and with real faith, be convinced that one day we will win./PN
