spot_img
28.6 C
Philippines
Friday, March 29, 2024

Politics as elixir

- Advertisement -

"What makes supra-senior citizens, who have tasted the perks and privileges of political power so many times over, across three generations of voters, still want to ‘serve?’"

 

Juan Ponce Enrile is 94 years old, and will be 95 by February next year when the campaign begins. Yet he is running for senator which requires reaching out to the entire electorate.

Fred Lim is running for mayor of Manila for the umpteenth time.  He says he is 88 years of age, but a Manila congressman who claims he has a copy of the birth certificate of Lim swears the guy is a nonagenarian in the league of Enrile.

Erap Estrada, born Joseph Marcelo Ejercito at Mary Johnston Hospital in Tondo on April 19, 1937, will be 82 years when Manilenos troop to the polls to elect him for a third term as their mayor, or choose someone else.

And, not to forget, there is Imelda Romualdez Marcos, whose age is in the same generational league as the first three politicians. After several terms as congresswoman of Leyte, then of Ilocos Norte, she is now running for, Mamma Mia!, governor of her husband’s home province, an executive position.

- Advertisement -

What makes supra-senior citizens like these men and woman who have tasted the perks and privileges of political power so many times over, across three generations of voters, still want to “serve?”

 I remember the late revered Speaker of the House, Jose Bayani Laurel Jr., born to a political family that began with the revolutionary Sotero during the Spanish period, to father Jose Paciano Laurel Sr., the wartime president of the Second Republic.

In 1984, when elections for the Batasang Pambansa, the unicameral legislature created by the Marcos Constitution of 1972 was called, and assemblymen were to be elected by the vote of their entire province, Speaker Laurel’s younger brother, Salvador “Doy” Laurel, as the leader of the political opposition, hastily cobbled up a slate in every province.  I was then Doy’s young assistant.

When it came to Batangas, leaders implored the former Speaker to lead the slate, which would include lawyers Hernando B. Perez and Rafael Recto, son of the legendary nationalist Don Claro Mayo Recto, and Benjamin Martinez of Balayan, Batangas.  Pepito Laurel was already in his seventies at the time, and initially begged off.  The much younger Doy could not run, as he had to campaign throughout the nation to make the UNIDO-led coalition candidates win.

But the Batanguenos pressed on, and Speaker Laurel gave in.  As the campaign progressed, I saw Tiyo Pepito gain physical strength, and in political rallies, the fire in his belly came out in explosions of colorful verbiage, expletives and humorous quips intertwined.

After a rally in Lipa, where we took a late repast in the house of the Recto’s, I marveled at the old man’s amazing rejuvenation, and told him my observation.

He chuckled as he responded, “lahat ng politiko, nabubuhayan ng dugo basta’t may halalan. Kapag tumindig na sa tribuna sa harap ng madla, nakakalimutan mo ang lahat ng dinaraing na sakit ng katawan, at wari mo’y batang-bata ka pa!”

Politics as elixir.

Remove it from the likes of Imelda, or JPE, Lim or Erap, and they will wither faster. 

* * *

Speaking of aging, we should all worry about our young men and women disdaining the farming ways of their parents, leaving their farming communities in search of better jobs and livelihood in the urban centers or even abroad.

We are fast losing an entire generation of future farmers, and this bodes ill for our food security.

 We have just experienced how wrong decisions of our food security agency caused a shortage of rice for consumer tables.  We have seen how this fueled an increase in the price of other kinds of food items, from fish to vegetables to even chili.

But looking at the medium and long term, we need to worry about the painful reality that our young people are abandoning the farms for the cities and abroad.

In Japan on the other hand, young consumers are fast replacing rice on their diets, and aging farmers struggle to survive as their market shrinks.

Fewer Japanese are eating rice, and annual per capita consumption has dropped to 55 kilos in 2015, less than its 1963 peak of close to 120 kilos.

In similar vein, fewer and fewer young Japanese continue to work the farms of their parents, and the average age of a rice farmer in Japan is now 67 years.

In the Philippines, where per capita rice consumption has been slowly decreasing (from 130 kilos per capita per annum in 2011 to around 120 kilos this year), the average age of our farmers is in the mid-fifties, even as the median age of the very young Filipino nation is 23.4 years. 

The tragedy of food security in the Philippines is more pronounced because we have to feed 107-million people from aggregate paddy fields of only 4.5 million hectares, 15 percent of the total land mass of the country.  Yet only 1.7-million of the hectarage devoted to palay is irrigated.

 Those who keep chiding government for failure to achieve rice self-sufficiency do not bother to compare our population numbers to our land mass.

We keep producing more and more babies and expect our farmers to be able to plant and harvest enough out of shrinking land areas.

With typhoons always visiting us and irrigation difficult to come by, it is time we took a second look at the near-impossible dream of self-sufficiency in rice.  But we must have a plan, a comprehensive food security plan that will answer the needs not only of the present, beset by ‘‘Ompong’’ and now the visiting, ravaging ‘‘Rosita,’’ but of the future.

Unfortunately, the kind of saliva that our politicians, young and old, churn every election campaign is not enough to irrigate our farms, much as cheap talk coupled with optics and empty promises from government agency heads cannot even assure our consumers of enough affordable food on their tables. Talk is never an elixir except in the kind of politics we practice in this benighted land.

Sad, but frightening.

- Advertisement -

LATEST NEWS

Popular Articles