What’s wrong with the picture? Raul Gonzalez has created the Anti-Rice Hoarding Task Force which will hound “unscrupulous rice traders for acts inimical to public interest.” This is in response to his boss’ order to crack down on the devils that would make Filipinos hungry. Those found screwing their compatriots in this wise face life imprisonment. Gonzalez confirmed the existence of a Chinese rice cartel but said the task force was not targeting the Chinese in particular. “We will not engage in a witch hunt.” Meanwhile, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo allotted P5 billion for agricultural subsidy and ordered the National Food Authority to raise its buying price of “palay” [rice before milling] by 40 percent.
The first thing that’s wrong with that picture is obvious. It was obvious when House Speaker Prospero Nograles, whose prosperity has increased by leaps and bounds in this regime, first proposed the idea of throwing in jail and depositing the key to the bottom of the ocean people selling rice at exorbitant prices. That is that they are suffering from an eye condition that has yet to be explained by optometrists, its unusual symptom being an ability to see a grain of sand while being unable to see a boulder. You want to jail for life the friendly neighborhood Chinese or “Bombay” who rips off Juan de la Cruz at the margin while providing him with goods and services government cannot but reward with “borjers” people who rip the shirt off his back?
Speaking of borjers, compare the entire agricultural subsidy with the $130-million “bukol” [bulge] Jun Lozada accused Benjamin Abalos of demanding from the national broadband network deal. At the exchange rate then, Abalos would have gotten around P6.5 billion, which is more than Arroyo’s entire emergency subsidy in these desperate times. That is just one kickback by one official from one deal. Imagine the size of the “bukol” the First Couple alone are causing on Juan de la Cruz’s head. You want the Binondo cartel to rot for life in jail and the Malacańang Mafia to rule for life in the Palace by the river?
The second thing that’s wrong with the picture is less obvious but more insidious. That is that the cause of the disease is pretending to be its cure. Arroyo did not create the rice crisis but she created the situation that made us exceptionally vulnerable to it. She it was who obsessively pursued a policy of relying on global markets for rice on the ground that it was cheaper to buy it than to produce it. Other countries, including the developed ones that were aggressively pushing for open markets, refused to do it, putting food security at the top of their list. Japan, for whom buying rice would have been worlds cheaper than producing it, continued to produce it even at great cost to itself. Our own farmers’ groups kept warning about the shortsightedness, or sheer folly, of neglecting food production. Government would not listen, Arroyo least of all.
Today, we’re the biggest importer of rice in Asia—some say in the world. That is so notwithstanding that we introduced “miracle rice” to the world by way of the International Rice Research Institute. The scorn for food production has resulted in an alarming plunge in the number of Filipino farmers and farmlands over the last decade or so.
Can we still stave off the specter of hunger that looms on the country? Only if we massively subsidize food production, buying high (from farmers) and selling low (to consumers), which is going to take much, much more than P5 billion. One way to do that is by getting the crooks in government to return the money they stole from the nation, talk of economic sabotage, talk of making Juan de la Cruz hungry, talk of hanging the guilty from the nearest tree. But that is as likely to happen as Arroyo stepping down in 2010.
The third thing that’s wrong with the picture is even less obvious and even more vicious. Gonzalez says they won’t target or witch-hunt the Chinese in their anti-hoarding campaign. The example of Indonesia in 1998 says otherwise.
As a result of the financial crisis of 1997, Indonesia, which had been doing fairly well up till then, found itself in dire straits. The International Monetary Fund, to whom it went for help, demanded that it set its financial house in order, not least by removing subsidies on oil and food. Suharto complied and almost overnight the prices of oil and rice soared.
This triggered a series of riots in Jakarta, which were aimed at the Chinese. The reason for this being that government had been telling the public the Chinese were to blame for it, hoarding rice and manipulating prices as they did. The riots turned into a pogrom, the rioters not being content to smash shops and looting them but going on to rape and murder Chinese citizens. More than 1,000 people died in the riots, mostly from burning structures but some others from being shot and killed.
The normally ubiquitous police and soldiers were nowhere to be found during the riots. In fact, later investigations supplied evidence many of the “rioters” had been trained by the military, if they were not soldiers themselves, suggesting official blessings for the riots. The point is simple: Governments beleaguered by a crisis of their own making will create scapegoats to redirect public wrath to them, some more malevolently than others.
Rice prices soar in this country over the next few months, or worse rice disappears from shelves, and with all this talk of a cartel in Manila’s Chinatown area Binondo you’ll have more to worry about than being kidnapped if you’re Chinese.
The farmers’ groups have been demanding angrily that government tell the truth, if only for once in its life, about the rice crisis. That is not going to happen of course, but they have a point. If ever truth needed to be known about anything, it is about this. The rice crisis is a matter of life and death.
It is a case where what you don’t know can kill you.
