Haste

"These are laws rushed in reaction to events or sad experiences."

Trite though the saying goes, “haste makes waste,” it is apropos to look back at some pieces of legislation that were rushed, more in reaction to events or sad experiences, that now cause unintended consequences.

Top of mind is the rice tariffication law, which, while a step in the right direction toward a better and more sustainable rice policy, has created so much grief in the countryside while not exactly achieving the promised reduction of consumer prices for our basic staple.

Admittedly, the regime of quantitative restrictions on rice imports and the National Food Authority’s monopoly since 1995 when we acceded to the World Trade Organization’s free trade economic order, has been ineffective and led to unsustainable government indebtedness.

Worse, our agriculture officials through the past two decades were unable to get our rice farmers highly productive as to be able to compete with our Asean neighbors even as politics made government subsidize both consumer prices and farming inputs but in a most inefficient manner.

The woes of our agriculture sector are much too many and too difficult that it would take volumes to discuss and dissect.  Present woes are a result of wrong policies, graft-ridden implementation, and neglect.  The blame is to be shared by many.

The NFA and supervising officials inefficiently managed our rice supply in the incipient years of the present administration, leading to high food inflation last year that affected our economic momentum.  In reaction, Congress proceeded to passing rice tariffication while lifting import restrictions on rice.  The policy direction was pending through several past Congresses but failed to pass because rice was, and is, a political commodity that affects every Filipino, whether rice eater or rice planter.

But the resulting legislation completely emasculated the National Food Authority, now bereft of power to influence the market and thus affect consumer prices positively. Ostensibly, the NFA gives our farmers a mantle of protection from cheap imports by buying palay at highly subsidized prices, while the agriculture department tries to make them more competitive with their Asean counterparts through provision of inputs and other assistance.  This is unfortunately more theoretical than practical.

Even the imposition of phyto-sanitary standards over rice imports was taken away and given to the Bureau of Plant Industry which is insufficiently manned to do the job properly.  Thus, without quantitative restrictions and neither qualitative restrictions, the importers went on a buying spree abroad, which the USDA estimates as 3.1 million tons (that’s 62-million bags of milled rice) or some 23 percent of total consumption.

As far as I recall, we have at most an annual shortfall of 15 percent in calamitous years, and a normal import requirement of  8 percent or about a million tons.  

Some 92 percent or at worst, 85 percent of our rice consumption is supplied by our local farmers.  But with the deluge of imports on the first year of the lifting of restrictions, domestic palay prices dropped precipitously.  Even our rice millers have decreased the volume of rice they mill.

Under the implementing regulations to implement the law, the NFA should have by now stopped selling its rice stocks because the new law has also taken away its market role.  But they still have stocks they need to dispose of, because cheap imports, while higher priced than NFA’s P27-per-kilo retail, are of better quality.

Now the NFA is being ordered to buy whatever palay it could from the farmers, at P17 per kilo, much higher than the private traders could offer.  But NFA has neither the funding wherewithal nor the milling capacity to complete the task at a time of peak domestic harvest.

Always the whipping boy (though the present administrator is a feisty lady), NFA could only parry the blows from policy-makers and the media.  Castrated of its powers to intervene in the market, they are still being blamed.

That’s the problem when we legislate in reaction.

Of course, our present Constitution, also hastily written by less than 50 “wise” men and women appointed by President Cory, is reactive to the abuses and excesses of a previous authoritarian regime.  And we continue to suffer from that reactive fundamental law which could otherwise have been pro-active and attune to the fast-changing international order.

And now our policy-makers propose to add to our already bloated but ineffective bureaucracy, a Department for Overseas Workers.

But we have a functioning Department of Labor and Employment which has fielded overseas labor offices all over the world, headed by labor attache’s most of whom developed their people skills through the years and through rotation in posts.  We have welfare officers under the OWWA who minister to the needs of our distressed OFWs.

For sure, there are problems, especially in harsh country conditions, but this is to be expected when we field virtually a 10th of our population abroad because the economy cannot at present absorb the entire work force in well-paying jobs.

But what good, pray tell, will having a new department for OFWs do, except to gouge out the DOLE and perhaps replace career people with new recruits with little experience?

We announced the creation of a bank to serve OFW needs, and assigned the implementation to the Land Bank, but two years after, nada.  Anyare?

And are we now saying that the Filipino diaspora is a permanent thing, that we elevate the fielding of our work force abroad as a national policy, instead of seeking, difficult though it be due to unbridled birth multiplication, to strengthen the domestic economy and absorb the labor force?

Passed in haste by the lower house, the Senate is our last recourse, to drive sense into this penchant for creating new departments as reaction to problems, which makes more waste but makes little sense.

There are departments which manage too much and often disparate, even conflicting mandates, such as the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.  But those are other stories deserving future columns.

For now, we ask our senators to think twice before we add another layer of bureaucracy that would only increase expectations while achieving little.