Once again the food security conundrum is in the news.
Cabinet Secretary Leoncio Evasco Jr., under whose supervision Executive Order No. 1 of President Rodrigo Duterte placed the National Food Authority and the National Irrigation Administration, is contemplating disciplinary action upon the newly-appointed NFA administrator, Jason Aquino.
Manila Standard reported last Monday that Aquino refused to follow a decision made by the NFA Council to extend the arrival date of imports under the Minimum Access Volume to March 31, from the original Feb. 28. Accordingly, Administrator Aquino and his deputies failed to attend the Council meeting and thereafter refused to implement its directives.
The NFA Council is composed of the assigns of the Executive Secretary, Neda, DoF, DTI, Bangko Sentral, DBP, LandBank, an elected farm sector representative and the Cabinet Secretary, who acts as chairperson. The administrator acts as vice chairman as well of the Council.
The Council is the highest policy-making body of the NFA, while the administrator is tasked to implement said policies and administers the operation of the agency in charge of ensuring the availability and affordability of rice, at ALL times. I highlight “all” because being the staple cereal of 104 million Filipinos, not a day can pass that there is not enough rice to satisfy our consumption needs.
Under my watch, the chairperson was the Secretary of Agriculture, since the agency was attached to the DA. But in 2014, two years after I resigned from the NFA, President Aquino removed NFA, NIA (irrigation), PCA (coconuts) and FPA (fertilizers and pesticide licensing) from the DA and placed these under the supervision of a newly-created Office of the Presidential Assistant for Food Security and Agricultural Modernization (OPAFSAM).
Aquino appointed then retired Senator Francis Pangilinan as food security czar who since regained his old seat in the Senate.
The ostensible reason for the transfer to the Office of the President, which had precedents under both Marcos and Erap, was the failure of the NFA to prevent rice price spikes under the reign of Alcala and his appointee. Likewise, Aquino was not happy with the corruption he and Neda uncovered in the NIA.
The most important mandate of the NFA is to ensure food security. Under Marcos this encompassed rice and corn, later expanded to other necessities such as vegetables and fish, which is why the agency put up “Kadiwa” stores in major consumption centers. Under succeeding administrations, this assurance of food security was defined to be a single food product—rice.
Alcala and I thus had in a sense, conflicting mandates. His was to increase food production and farm incomes; mine was to ensure that rice was available and affordable to the average Filipino at all times, La Nina, El Nino, typhoons notwithstanding.
But things became untenable when Alcala was able to convince President Aquino that we could be self-sufficient in rice production by 2013, or in two years after he and the president unveiled the ill-conceived program and impossible-to-attain target. During official visits to Japan, in Davos and elsewhere, the president was made to proclaim the chimera of self-sufficiency before unbelieving audiences.
Alcala had to create the impression of reaching his self-imposed target, and thus NFA under his chairmanship was directed to cut down importation drastically, even unrealistically. I had to explain in several memoranda to the President through the Executive Secretary that Alcala’s targets were numerically flawed, but the President weighed in his favor of his friend.
Despite this, we managed to stabilize supply versus demand and thus contain prices during my watch, even when a strong typhoon (Pepeng) on Sept. 26, 2011 wiped out the harvestable crop of Nueva Ecija and Central Luzon, the nation’s chief granary.
But by 2013, under the watch of Alcala’s assign, prices began to rise, and in early until the middle of 2014, the increase became cause for consumer protests. Inflation rose dramatically on account of commercial rice prices, which spiked from the 30 to 32 peso range in 2012 to as high as 42 to 48 peso range in 2014.
Unable to let go of Alcala (the same way he could not fire Abaya, et al), Aquino chose instead to transfer NFA and threw in three other DA agencies to Pangilinan’s supervision. Pangilinan was able to tame the price spike and rice became more available, but NFA, which had imported on a government to government basis 200,000 metric tons in 2011, followed by a reduced 120,000 tons in 2012, now went back to the million-ton levels that President Aquino in his first SONA in July 2010 decried as GMA’s practice, leaving the NFA saddled with a P178-billion “legacy” debt.
Now it looks like the debate between so-called farmer’s interests and food security, or the consumer’s interests, is upon us again.
Cabsec Jun Evasco is right. Food security is paramount. And the onus of importing rice should be gradually given to the private sector. Government, defined as NFA, cannot sustain humongous debts, which are sovereign-guaranteed.
He is sustained by the members of the NFA Council, especially at this time when a strong dollar has weakened the peso, oil prices have regained from a slump, and interest rates threaten to increase, all of these showing inflation is a clear and present danger. Rice impacts on some 8 percent of the price index.
The “legacy” debt of P178 billion was trimmed to less than P150 billion in two years under my watch principally because of shifting to the private sector. Now it is back, I was told, to the P170-billion level.
Aquino and Alcala’s impossible dream of rice self-sufficiency at all costs, including bloated budgets DBM gave to Alcala, has been an unmitigated failure, which even spawned illegal importations in 2013-14.
I suffered in silence when the Senate investigated the NFA for rice smuggling done in 2013 and the year thereafter, even if I had resigned in October 2012 to run for a seat in Congress but which I had to forego after a heart procedure.
The unfair allegations hurt, but I tempered my defense because speaking forcefully against Alcala’s failed policies would reflect badly on the same power that appointed me to the NFA, President Benigno S. Aquino, who listened to clearly idiotic promises.
The allegations even got the NBI and DOJ under Leila de Lima to file charges with the Office of the Ombudsman against me and several officials of the NFA, swallowing the unfounded claims of Alcala’s attack dogs. Still I kept my peace and suffered in silence, confident that the honorable Ombudsman can see through the lies and the injustice of such actions.
Confident that an incorruptible Ombudsman would see the falsehood in the charges De Lima and her cohorts hastily charged me and my officials with, I still kept my peace. As prayed for, the charges have been dismissed since.