There’s been some excitement this week over our relationships with the rest of the world.
In Kuwait, the government there gave our ambassador one week to leave the country, as well as recalling their own ambassador to Manila. The stated reason was insulting remarks supposedly made by Ambassador Renato Villa to a local paper, as well as the involvement of embassy staff in rescuing Filipina household helpers from abusive employers. Two of those staff have since been arrested, current fate unknown.
We can’t comment on the good ambassador’s remarks since, to my knowledge, they haven’t been published here yet. Nonetheless, DFA’s Alan Cayetano has already formally apologized over the Entebbe-like rescue of our OFWs, even as the embassy claims that they fully coordinated with local authorities on the rescue operation.
The larger backdrop, of course, was an incensed Duterte’s decision to suspend OFW deployments to Kuwait following the discovery of the murder of OFW Joanna Demafelis. Her employers were ordered arrested, but the Kuwaiti government doesn’t seem keen to seek the couple’s extradition from Lebanon and Syria, leaving some to wonder if this isn’t just a moro-moro being put up among fellow Arab countries.
This face-off with Kuwait is something we think is being watched with interest by other Middle East countries. Will the Philippine government back down, or are we ready to put our money where our mouths are?
My own inclination is clear: We’ve drawn a line in the sand on this issue, so let’s keep that line in place. There are other countries willing to take our OFWs. Let’s stick to our guns and show Kuwait and its neighbors that we won’t be pushed around when the lives of our citizens—unlike mere pieces of rock in the West Philippine Sea—are on the line.
***
Talking about the WPS, another maritime face-off is shaping up between China and another of its neighbors. This time the aggrieved party is Taiwan, whom the Chinese regard as a wayward province of theirs—not just a neighbor. This attitude doesn’t sit well with many Taiwanese, especially its current and strongly independence-minded president Tsai Ing-wen.
Earlier this week the Taiwanese announced that they would be conducting military exercises aimed at simulating an invasion from the mainland. Not to be outdone, an aircraft carrier of those mainlanders initiated a live fire drill in the East China Sea around the wayward province. And from farther-away Tokyo, the venerable newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun gravely advised the Chinese not to intimidate Taiwan.
Even earlier, three Australian warships visiting Vietnam were challenged by the Chinese navy in an exchange that was described as polite but “robust.” All this, and we haven’t even heard from the Americans yet.
This maritime game of chicken is a high-stakes game for the big boys with the big guns. It’s not one which you win by going crying to the UN referees every time you’re outgunned. Duterte has been around the block quite a few times on the rough streets of Davao City, so when he says it’s better to fold a weak hand rather than play it, that’s a piece of advice worth heeding, albeit painful to our pride.
This is why we can only squirm when someone like Risa Hontiveros scores the President for “surrendering our sovereignty and territories to China.” Characteristically, though, it’s leftist types like her who’d be the first to pounce on legitimate exercises of military power—like placing terrorist-riven Mindanao under martial law—or criticize the acquisition of military assets as taking food away from the mouths of the poor.
Just as bad are her party-list colleagues, like congressman Tom Villarin, who warned that 200,000 farmers and workers in Mindanao would lose their jobs if the meddlesome EU dropped our preferential trade arrangement over the issue of so-called EJKs. Or former Congressman Etta Rosales, who warned that losing our membership in the UN Human Rights Commission over the same EJK issue would deal a deathblow to our bilateral relations with other countries.
Rarely have I come across such inflated alarmism. It’s the kind of wild exaggeration that insists the number of EJKs is 20,000 and counting, no matter how often the PNP puts out its statistic that the casualties from drug-related police operations were less than 4,000.
Here’s some advice for our ostensibly nervous Nellies:
Guys, much of our European trade will survive tariffication at the levels that apply to non-preferred countries. There are other export markets as well for us outside the EU. And the bilateral relationships we have forged with other countries on the common principle of mutual self-interest will survive the meddling of the bureaucrats of the EU and the UN.
***
Over on the economic side of our foreign relations, our seemingly haphazard rice policy seems to have taken a firmer direction with the recent presidential directive to transfer the NFA and related agencies back to supervision by the Agriculture Department.
Agriculture Secretary Manny Piñol disclosed that Duterte has given him three directives for NFA: reorganize its management body, increase its buffer stock, and hike its buying price for palay from local farmers.
The first one is straightforward: who doesn’t want better management? We’re assuming that this will include a clearer delineation of authority between NFA management and the inter-agency governing NFA Council, one that will avert future conflicts in decision-making that recently stymied much-needed rice imports and almost caused a rice shortage.
The second one is also uncontroversial. In fact, even advocates of radical rice sector reform agree that the best role for NFA—in fact, what should be its only major role, aside from general oversight—is to maintain buffer rice reserves in what is now the world’s largest rice importer.
The third directive—if the President truly wants to maintain the NFA as a source of subsidies for local farmers—-is not necessarily incompatible with a broader policy to open up rice imports to the private sector and take away the NFA’s monopoly.
By opening up imports, the market will automatically adjust rice supply to avoid shortages. The lower prices of imported rice will limit the amounts required to subsidize our rice farmers. And the tariff revenue generated from rice imports can further beef up the funding of those subsidies.
To his credit, Secretary Piñol, a self-described gentleman farmer, has obviously been wearing his thinking cap for a while now to come up with interesting new ideas. For example, he now wants the NFA to expand beyond rice and become more active in trading abroad for our farmers and fishermen. He cited the examples of India and Vietnam in promoting a full range of their agri-fisheries products abroad.
This is all fine, provided that this role doesn’t over time become a mandatory one, let alone a monopoly, that crowds out private traders. And let’s hope that the “buy high, sell low” mandate followed by NFA for rice doesn’t transfer to include other crops as well. Heaven knows that NFA’s rice-related subsidies are already high enough without having to add to them for other agricultural commodities.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.