From the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, our premier agricultural school, comes the good news about its summa cum laude graduate emphasizing the role that agriculturists play in our economy.
Arnel Villancio Jr. who graduated with a weighted average of 1.1762 (Wow!) said in his valedictory that (while) “I do not believe that agriculturists are the ones who feed the world because that noble responsibility rests on the farmers…(we have) to continuously find ways for the world to feed itself.”
“In the midst of challenges that could weaken agriculture, the agriculturists are one with farmers to ensure that the world will not go hungry,” said Villancio.
How very true.
In a world whose climate has been victimized by neglect and abuse, and whose changing patterns now affect food production all over the globe, only better knowledge and modern technology coming from scientists and agriculturists can yet stave off mass hunger, especially among poor nations which cannot afford to keep importing its food requirements.
UP Los Baños has helped train agriculturists and agronomists here and around Asia, particularly those in the so-called VCLMT region. VCMLT stands for Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, once called the Indo-Chinese peninsula in history. Many of their students once enrolled at UPLB. But nowadays, young Filipinos studying agriculture have been dwindling, just as young men and women tilling our fields have likewise dwindled, enticed instead to work abroad while their aging parents eke out subsistence in the homeland.
The pattern of disinterest in farming endangers our food security, precarious as it already is.
One unintended consequence of the Local Governments Code, which provided greater autonomy in governance and wherewithal to local government units, is the devolution of agricultural extension workers to the municipalities and cities. The Department of Agriculture thus has no direct supervision in the transfer of technology to our farmers.
Where these LGUs are governed by development-oriented officials who get bright young graduates from our agriculture schools to assist their farmers to produce better and more profitably, then well and good. But where, as in many cases, provincial, city and municipal agriculturists are mere political leaders or followers with no real knowledge of farming or modern technology, then woe unto our poor farmers.
And woe unto our food production.
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Our biggest agricultural exports, no longer coconut and sugar products, are bananas and pineapples. In the case of China, for instance, virtually all our agricultural exports to it consist of those two fruit products.
Because of our President’s deliberate goodwill to the giant economy so near to us, it promised to buy at least a billion dollars worth of bananas and pineapples from us this year. That is good news, for now we export only 620 million dollars worth of these to them.
But truth to tell, we are finding it difficult to produce the incremental 380 million dollars worth of agricultural exports to China.
We have to be serious, deadly serious, about agricultural growth.
And yet, traveling across the land, we still see so much undeveloped and underdeveloped land. In a country where so many are jobless, and many are malnourished, this is unthinkable.
In Taiwan, cheek and jowl beside modern factories producing bicycles (they are the world’s biggest producer), or sports shoes and equipment (also the world’s biggest), you see patches of what could be idle land planted instead to vegetables, even palay. As a result, food here is cheap and affordable.
Taiwanese drool at the sight of our underdeveloped fields and know how they could make these more productive with their agriculturists and farm technologies. But of course, our Constitution forbids foreign ownership of land.
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Speaking of food security, recent numbers from the Philippine Statistics Authority about NFA’s dwindling rice inventory are quite alarming.
Their very able agricultural statistician, Dr. Romeo Recide, must himself be extremely bothered that by end-May, all the NFA holds is less than 200,000 metric tons, equivalent to some six days’ worth of rice inventory.
That is the lowest in the last 3 years, PSA avers. I would calculate that by the end of this week, we would have just three to four days of inventory, because NFA cannot stop selling to its retailers, lest it trigger panic in the market. That stock position should be the lowest since 1995, when a major food crisis hit the Ramos administration. It could even be similar to what happened in 1972, when Marcos ordered Filipinos to eat rice and corn mix, because a great flood destroyed our Central Luzon palay fields.
NFA assures us that it is rushing the importation of the staple. That’s cold comfort, considering that one cannot fly in rice, nor can an agency of government bid purchases overnight.
And here we are insisting on “unli” rice, while our agriculture statisticians are so worried, hoping that their own estimates of household and commercial stocks are accurate enough to stave off the extremely precarious government inventory position.
By law and by practice, NFA should be holding 30 days inventory as of this week, and at east 15 days consumable rice stock at any time of the year. Four days is what they likely have as we write this. OMG!
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In a conference in Taipei two weeks ago where our own kababayan, former DTI secretary Greg Domingo was a resource speaker, Dr. Surin Pitsuwan, former Asean secretary-general, spoke of the prospects of Asean being Taiwan’s partner in its New Southbound Policy.
The eloquent Dr. Surin touted the advantages of our Asean economies playing host to Taiwanese investments. I smiled when I recalled that we used to talk of the VMLC economies as the region’s least developed, referring to the then-underperforming Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
Dr. Romy Recide (then head of the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics), DA Undersecretary for Policy Dr. Fred Serrano and this writer, who would always be together in regional and international food conferences during the first three years of the previous administration, would nervously joke among each other about the extant possibility of the V in VMLC becoming P as in PMLC. Vietnam is no longer underperforming. It has in fact become a fast-developing economy, host to seven times more foreign direct investments than we got in the last six years.
You know what P stands for. OMG, huwag naman sana!