"We must act now, and plan farther ahead."
"We must act now, and plan farther ahead."
Reports about the number of provinces affected by El Niño this year are getting to be cause for alarm.
The National Food Authority, for instance, which has lost its mandate to import rice, and has been confined to buy palay from local farmers for its buffer stock, will be hard put to fulfill its task, with El Niño hitting so many places.
The biggest source of palay purchases of NFA is Occidental Mindoro. The province is now suffering the worst drought in decades, its riverine sources of irrigation water drying up.
Of course, with the lifting of quantitative restrictions on rice imports, the private sector will likely increase its import volumes, and USDA predicts that we will hit a record total of 2.67 million metric tons this year.
While that may reassure consumers particularly in the urban areas of affordable rice, we must not forget that farmers are themselves heavy rice consumers. With El Niño drying up their fields and bringing down incomes from lower harvests, we need to worry about hunger in the countryside.
The impact of the free trade on rice could in the long term act as a disincentive for farmers to plant more palay, unless government can manage production well and assure farmers of higher incomes. It is not going to be easy.
And El Niño brings stronger typhoons than usual. With our surrounding oceans warming up due to it, the approaching typhoons churn up stronger winds and suck up more water that becomes rain. “Ondoy” and “Milenyo” come to mind. They happened during El Niño years.
Our Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Teddyboy Locsin, brought up the spectre of climate change when he spoke before the United Nations recently and warned that unless the concert of nations banded together to seriously cool the planet now afflicted with global warming, we may be destroying the habitat of billions.
I recall a very disturbing movie that I watched ages ago, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, if memory serves me right still.
In that movie, the world had become a wasteland, with food becoming scarce, and a company produced “healthy biscuits” purportedly from plankton derived from the world’s oceans. As the story unraveled though, it became apparent that the “plankton” was really from dead human bodies. The product, which was also the title of the movie, “Soylent Green” was actually people.
Strides in biotechnology through the past decade have of course increased human capability to produce more food, but it comes at a high cost that poorer nations such as the Philippines still find unaffordable.
Further, the continuing decline in farmer population is another cause for alarm. The current age of Filipino farmers is 57 years old. Their children disdain eking out a livelihood from farming, and are instead going to the urban centers to find work. Who will till our farmlands and keep providing us with food?
Then again, the continuing exodus from farms to urban centers will tend to make governments more biased toward favoring consumers to keep food inflation low. This means sourcing cheap food imports often at the expense of domestic farmers’ incomes. The cycle will perpetuate itself—lower farm incomes equals less interest in farming equals less farmers equals lower production of food. A worrisome specter.
Even now, plantations in Negros island and Mindanao are finding it difficult to get seasonal labor especially at harvesttime which is labor-intensive, because able bodied men would rather work in construction. And with Build, Build, Build, the demand for construction workers keeps increasing.
The balancing act becomes more and more difficult.
Water is another worry. Angat Dam managers recently announced that they are reducing irrigation water for Bulacan and Pampanga farms in favor of Metro Manila’s needs.
In many parts of the globe, populations are beginning to have conflicts over water sources. The Philippines itself does not have a surfeit of fresh water sources, with many of our islands being limestone structures with little, if any, groundwater sources.
Picture a situation where China and India decide to divert the headwaters from the snow-capped Himalayas, which now flow into the lowlands of Indo-China and Myanmar, through the Irrawaddy and Mekong rivers.
Unthinkable? Never foreclose the dire possibility.
Of course all these jeremiads of doom are not likely to happen within our lifetime (at least this writer’s). But what of the future generations, by 2050 or beyond?
Viewing northern Taiwan from the air as one’s plane encircles Taoyuan International Airport before landing, you see several man-made lakes, actually water-impounding catchments that are used mainly for irrigation.
Should we not be doing the same?
Even in urban centers, every drop of water must be conserved. Imagine if we scooped the earth beneath the Quezon Memorial Circle, and made it a catchment basin for rainwater?
It also solves the flooding experienced in the area during heavy rainfall.
I once stayed in a Baguio City hotel where the builder-owner wisely caught the rainwater and diverted these to a catchment basin that was then recycled for toilet and maintenance use.
In Tzu Chi Foundation hospitals all over Taiwan, the practice of recycling rainwater for everyday use is practiced.
Why ever not, indeed?
There are so many ways by which we can alleviate the problems that our country, and for that matter, our world will soon face in confronting the challenges of water and food shortages and climate change.
But we must act now, and plan farther ahead.
