I was invited to a dinner last Monday by a group of Taiwanese businessmen led by Tyson Hsieh, an old friend of the Philippines, for our livestock raisers who call themselves the Pro-Pork Association.
Some 40 Filipino businessmen from different parts of the country are here on a five-day visit to farms and processing plants to see how they can learn from Taiwanese technology in producing better food at lower costs.
Indeed, Taiwan food costs are quite affordable, which explains why their per capita rice consumption is lower than ours while their daily diet is protein-rich, from abundant fish, fowl, vegetables and meat, and extra vitamins from some of the best fruits in the world.
Our Filipino visitors were amazed at the contrasts: the per capita pork consumption in Taiwan is 45 kilos per year; the Philippines is 15 kgs. only. In beef, they eat 17 kilos a year each; ours is not even a fifth of that. The disparate ratios are more skewed when it comes to vegetables and fruits.
The pro-pork group are trying to entice the Filipino consumers to eat more pork, belying the so-called health hazards of meat. But I said that at the end of the day, it’s all a matter of cost. Pork, at upwards of 200 pesos per kilo in wet markets, is quite unaffordable to many Filipinos. The Taiwanese pay about 150 per kilo in comparison, very affordable even to the minimum wage worker, who gets the equivalent of 35,000 pesos. Taiwanese hog raisers are able to sell lower, even if they import most of their animal feed requirements, from soybeans to corn. The Philippines, at least produces plenty of corn, an important ingredient in animal feeds.
Our kababayans were amazed at the variety of produce available in Taiwan, at much affordable prices in comparison to the food cost to average income ratios back home.
Which brings me next to the finding of the recent public opinion polls in our country. The biggest concerns are still controlling inflation, increasing incomes, and providing jobs. In short, as then Senator Alan Cayetano used to say, “Presyo, Trabaho, Kita.”
These are always the average Filipino’s lament. “Pataas ang presyo ng bilihin; maliit ang kita; kay hirap ng trabaho.”
The “lucky” 10 percent of the population are working abroad, as an escape from the paucity of well-paying jobs to afford the cost of living back home.
In the next five years of the Duterte administration, there ought to be a big improvement in the quality of life of the Pinoy masa, as measured in terms of quality of life, otherwise defined as the affordability of basic needs for a decent life, which Duterte explains as “having a more comfortable life.”
That is really the challenge, awesome as it is considering the many wasted years when successive governments failed to measure up to the P-T-K aspirations of our countrymen.
And yet the answer is really to focus on the most doable, on the so-called low-hanging fruits.
Which I, and many other opinion writers keep identifying as agriculture and tourism.
More cost-efficient and more productive agriculture means higher farm incomes, which impacts positively on the lives of a third of our total population.
More production with proper cost economies means more food available to the rest of our people at more affordable prices.
Considering that we have so much arable land compared to the Taiwanese or the Japanese, it is a matter of applying the right technology and getting our farmers to go into high-value crops with adequate credit facilities and other government support. The solutions have been identified long ago. The previous administration wasted six years and billions of pesos pursuing the chimera of rice self-sufficiency within three years as advocated by then secretary Proceso Alcala, and in the process, agricultural growth declined.
The Duterte government must attend to this low-hanging fruit with so much impact on Presyo, Trabaho at Kita.
The other low-hanging fruit is tourism.
First of all, ours is a beautiful tropical paradise. Sure, there are certain blips, like Marawi, like the Abu Sayyaf along the way. But these are incidents which can be isolated to particular areas of our diverse island geography. We have so much to offer, in practically every region of our country, and the world has come to recognize that.
Secondly, the needed infrastructure could be aggressively pursued by public-private sector partnership, especially in providing the right facilities in the proper destinations. And aside from the construction jobs that such efforts will create, the tourism industry creates jobs for the semi-skilled who do not even need to be college graduates.
Third, aggressive, targeted promotions. Not a matter of promoting the islands to the entire world market, but concentrated efforts in those countries where because of proximity and cost, the Philippines would be a most attractive travel destination. We just have to get our act together, and under the leadership of a president determined to leave his citizens with “a more comfortable life” at the end of his term, do all these with determination, purpose and zeal.