Commentary
Rice-land shortage
By Silverio J. Berenguer
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:01:00 04/07/2008
Filed Under: Food, Agriculture, rice problem
MANILA, Philippines - Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap was closer to the truth than he realized when he said, “There is no rice shortage in the country.” I agree with him. We do not have a rice shortage in the Philippines. What we have is a rice-land shortage.
Farmlands that used to be devoted to rice production are contributing less and less to our national foodbasket: our yield today of 2.5 tons per hectare is the lowest in Asia. The main reason can be traced to an agrarian reform program that was started 36 years ago—well-intentioned but poorly executed, and riddled with inefficiencies that remain unaddressed.
Thousands of hectares of farmlands have been chopped up into parcels too small to deliver economies of scale. A study, conducted recently by the Department of Agrarian Reform and GTZ (a German foundation for international cooperation), says that investments in Philippine agriculture are the lowest in the Asean region! While farmers in the rest of Asia are modernizing their methods and improving their yields, our Filipino farmers have gone back to using carabaos; we are back to where we were 200 years ago.
In the Philippines, we have a total of 8.5 million hectares of arable land. To date, the DAR and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources have distributed 6.5 million hectares to 4 million farmer-beneficiaries. About half of this area is devoted to rice and corn, the first to go under Presidential Decree 27; more of these lands were distributed later under RA 6657; and eventually, grain productivity took a dive. In the 1960s, our irrigation system was hailed by the World Bank as one of the best in the world, yet by 2001, it had deteriorated badly due to corruption and lack of maintenance budget. An ill-advised Estrada policy (dubbed pro-poor) crippled the National Irrigation Administration and its ability to do its job, this according to Cesar Gonzales, NIA chief at that time.
The same DAR-GTZ study says that most of the farmer-beneficiaries continue to live in poverty. Out of the 4 million farmers who have been issued their CLOAs, about 3 million have not received support services, and have no access to credit. The audits done by the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council show that some farmer-cooperatives did receive support, but these were dissipated by officers of the cooperatives, because of ignorance or corruption.
If the agrarian reform program has been successful, how do we explain these findings of the DAR-GTZ study—that 26 percent of the farmer-beneficiaries sold/mortgaged their lands?
In Nueva Ecija, the figure was 41 percent. In Laguna, it was as high as 53 percent; in Quezon, 28 percent, and in Iloilo 35 percent! Worse, the farmer-beneficiaries obtained their loans at usurious rates of 2-3 percent per month.
The Philippines is now No. 31 in the list of failed agrarian reform programs in the world. Only three countries succeeded: Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Can we learn from that?
In 1988, when China faced food shortages, rationing and high grain imports (sounds familiar?), it decided to return to private land ownership. That was the year the Philippines moved up to the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP)!
Vietnam never embarked on agrarian reform despite its communist orientation, and yet it managed to become self-sufficient in rice and to be the second largest rice-exporting country after Thailand! While we hope they will sell us some rice soon, Vietnam will first ensure that their domestic demand is satisfied before they agree to part with this precious grain as any intelligent country would.
So where are we, after 36 years and some P142 billion of government money spent since 1987 on CARP? That’s conservative. In 1995, then Agrarian Reform Secretary Ernesto Garilao, seeking support from the World Bank, said that the total cost of implementing CARP had ballooned to P250 billion!
Among the goals of the agrarian reform program were to increase production and alleviate poverty by letting tillers own the land. PD 27 was issued by Marcos mainly to quell the insurgency. Yet even he had to admit that it did not work. The insurgency escalated, spilling into suburban violence and Cory’s administration took the brunt of it, leading to the passage of CARP.
But enough of Philippine agrarian reform’s unfortunate history. Assuming we can import rice this time around, can we really afford to buy imported rice year after year, to feed our growing population? There is a global rice shortage, and it’s bound to get worse. Twelve years ago, Agriculture Undersecretary Domingo Panganiban noted that “the Philippines was already importing up to 45.8 percent of its food supplies and the inflow was increasing.”
We should produce our own food rather than depend on the productivity of other countries.
The World Bank recommended scrapping the program. Land Bank executives proclaimed that productivity has declined because of land reform. Even the principal author of the Comprehensive Land Reform Law, Heherson Alvarez, confessed that CARP failed to deliver on its promise for the same reasons cited in the DAR-GTZ study.
Yet there is still a proposal in Congress to extend CARP after June of this year! The audit reports contain all the details: bureaucratic red tape, inefficiency, ignorance and corruption continue to hound CARP. But unless we are willing to look closely at its flaws and correct them, we Filipinos will soon be staring at empty plates.
Silverio J. Berenguer is a landowner representative in the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council, its Technical Working Group and the Audit Management and Investigation Committee.
|
