Politics of rice
NO food crop is more political than rice. I’ve noticed this since the mid-eighties when I worked in a congressman’s district field office. Politicians have always found it politically expedient to keep self-sufficiency in rice as a regular election promise. Hence, once elected they quickly forget it or merely pay lip-service to it.
Thus, we have never attained self sufficiency in rice. Official 2015 figures put us at 96% self-sufficient. But because it must remain a vote-getting promise of politicians around election time, and for one other big reason, chances are slim that the remaining 4% will ever be attained.
That other reason is “dirty” money from rice importations. Self-sufficiency must be slow to be attained, if at all, so cuts, bribes, etc. from rice importations can continue to help finance political careers.
President Duterte is right to go from some place political to economic when he disallows rice importation during local harvest time. It helps farmers get better price for their harvest and it stymies corrupt officials from getting the usual free money from rice importations.
What he needs to do next is make rice comprehensively an economic issue. It is sound economics to not view selfsufficiency in rice, food for that matter, as an absolute priority. Priority should be on the market-indicated means to grow the total economy in such a way that ordinary workers and small farmers earn high enough incomes to easily afford their basic necessities and more.
Japan is not even 50% self-sufficient in rice while Singapore has no farmland at all to grow rice in. Mid-East countries are not even self-sufficient in water. Yet, this is no problem to these countries because their people (farmers, workers, etc.) can afford to buy their basic food staples with their high incomes growing other crops or manufacturing other products.
Agricultural policies should not be forced to home in on self-sufficiency. These can much better be wrapped around programs that drastically improve farmer incomes. One way is to give them skills and incentives to grow high value crops. Another is to minimize or even eliminate the role of middlementraders who ever since have been making more money than farmer-producers.
But if and when we need to import rice, it is imperative to factor corruption out of the equation. One way to do this is abolish NFA’s monopoly on rice imports. Monopolies are never efficient. Besides, they are very vulnerable to corruption.
In any case, self-sufficient or not, the main worry should be how to give farmers higher incomes. It is a sad commentary on the politics of rice that we are 96% self-sufficient in it yet farmers remain the poorest of our poor.