MANILA: President Benigno Aquino III declared 2013 the National Year of Rice to intensify the campaign to achieve rice self-sufficiency this year, despite warnings by international organisations and agriculture economists that the goal is unattainable and even imprudent.
The president even promised in his year-end speech on the last day of 2012 that Filipinos can expect enough locally produced rice to feed the population soon.
Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) senior fellow Roehlano Briones, however, assessed the country’s capability to halt rice imports and concluded that the administration’s expensive Food Staples Sufficiency Programme is “too ambitious” to be realised.
“The rice self-sufficiency target is unlikely to be achieved, whether in 2013 or even over the course of the decade to 2020,” Briones said in PIDS study published late in 2012.
The Philippines, one of the world’s largest importers of rice, is set to end such imports altogether by producing 13.03m tons of milled rice in 2013 — a goal, which for Briones, is simply “unrealistic.”
Veteran business journalist Rene Pastor of New Jersey-based Philippine Commodities Digest shared Briones’ insight, even suggesting that the move is more political than it seems.
“The (rice sufficiency) target is a nice sound-bite in the Philippines … especially with mid-term elections coming up in May of next year,” Pastor said in a December 2012 article.
Economists from the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P) Centre for Food and Agribusiness, meanwhile, partly blamed government’s popular campaign to become an autonomous rice producer for “persistent” poverty in rural areas.
Calling the high allocation on rice development “misguided,” the study by the think tank found that the poorest of the poor belong to the fishing and coconut farming sectors that are barely reached by government support despite their productivity.
“The pursuit of the common good is hampered by the over-emphasis on the rice sector, which has led to lower incomes of non-rice farmers — (this is) one of the structural causes of food insecurity of the rural poor,” the research concludes.
However, agriculture economist Rolando Dy, the lead researcher of the UA&P study, refused to comment on whether the rice drive is advantageous to the country.
“The issue is a very sensitive one for Pnoy,” he said in an email response.
The World Bank, moreover, released a study on the country’s agribusiness in 2011 saying that the Aquino administration’s commitment to self-sufficiency makes the staple food more expensive for consumers.
“The fixation on rice self-sufficiency results in relatively higher price of rice in the domestic market compared to the world market price,” says the World Bank September 2011 report jointly written by National Economic Development Authority chief Artemio Balisacan and five other researchers.
Department of Agriculture’s banner policy to mainly fund rice programmes also makes farm lands costlier, the study notes.
Saying that local rice production is costlier, Briones similarly found that Filipinos will eventually find rice more expensive once government protects the country’s own outputs by barring cheaper imports.
The Philippine star
