“What happens when the exportable volume of rice in the world market gets thinner?”
The decimals may change each quarter, but the reality is bad — a fourth of our population experiences involuntary hunger.
By First World standards, that is criminal. By ASEAN standards, we are at the pits.
One reason is un-managed population growth.
While Thailand, with its 51 million hectares of land, used to have the same population as ours in 1978, we are now 114 million and growing.
Within the same period, Thais grew from 43 million to 66 through years of pro-active population management.
Then again, Thailand’s 51 million hectares is mostly contiguous land; ours is just 30 million hectares dispersed among 7,600 islands. Our population density is thus 2.9 times more than Thailand per square kilometer.
Because of these demographics, we produce less food than the Thais. Locally produced rice, poultry, pork, seafood, fruits and vegetables are plentiful and cheap in Thailand.
We import much of our food requirements to feed a big population, half of whom reside in urban centers where supply chain complexities compound prices.
Take rice, our staple food.
Last year, Thailand exported close to 10 million tons of rice. The Philippines imported 4.3 million tons, mostly from Vietnam, because Thai rice is more expensive as they have strategically targeted the higher end market.
Soon, Vietnam will follow suit, and in fact, they are devoting more land for high value crops, from coffee in the highlands to dragon fruit in the lowlands.
What happens when the exportable volume of rice in the world market gets thinner?
Recently, the DA and BOC confiscated containers of onions and fish.
For a country surrounded and interspersed with huge bodies of water, we now import fish, while our paltry vegetable produce cannot compete with the bumper crop of aromatics from countries like China, even tiny Taiwan. 98 percent of the garlic we consume without which our adobo cannot be cooked, is from Taiwan and China.
I go to the wet market weekly as I love to cook meals for my brood. Arranque in Manila and Cartimar in Pasay for seafood and vegetables; special meat cuts from Quiapo and San Andres.
Food is a continuing passion; cooking is relaxing.
In Arranque and Cartimar, there is a surfeit of imported vegetables, mostly from Taiwan and the mainland, while in Quiapo’s Quinta I buy locally-grown veggies.
Except for mangoes, bananas and pomelos, what we see in fruit stands are imported apples, oranges, grapes and pears, and gone are our santol, bayabas, makopa, duhat, siniguelas, atbp.
Even the peanuts that we toast and grind for the family’s favorite kare-kare is imported, as local peanuts are spottily available.
We grind the toasted nuts and malagkit rice because I never use commercial peanut butter for what friends and family call “ma piece de resistance.”
But our main concern should focus on the poor, both the desperate and the nouveau pauvre, the latter to include the lower middle class whose standards of living have been diminished by inflation.
BbM’s solution to our food-poor present is pure optics.
It was a false promise to begin with, defying the law of supply and demand, and now egregiously shifting the cost to the 95 percent who cannot access the hugely subsidized Benteng Bigas, Meron na (otro BBM).
But just how much palay can the State, through DA’s NFA buy?
Because of this false pretense intended to make false promise a delusional reality, our palay farmers are now groaning because NFA cannot buy enough of their produce, while the private millers and traders have been given reason to peg their buying prices lower than production costs.
Pity the farmer, Markham’s “man with the hoe,” always “magtanim ay di biro,” always at the losing end, because government is on survival mode, pleasing the consumer on TV news at the expense of the countryside poor.
It is classic “Utos, Sundin, Palakpak!”; Utos ni BbM ay Sundin ng mga ahensya, at Palakpakan (sana!) ng sambayanan, the Unique Selling Proposition which is the president’s cut and dried solution to address the public’s woes and hopefully shore up his decreasing trust and approval ratings.
We wrote about the Malacanang marketing guru’s strategy in this space last March 27, under the title “Branding,” but that may have been too late to make BbM’s Alyansa win. Now they are hoping it will reverse the decline.
It probably would. Madali namang pasakayin ang tao sa bansang ito. Incremental reasoning; never mind the medium and long-term consequences.