MANILA, Philippines - One late afternoon a fortnight ago I was standing on the sidewalk fronting my gate when I noticed two men, probably in their mid-thirties, one of them carrying a black plastic bag obviously containing the day’s marketing, walking back and forth the whole length of the sidewalk between the crossings, intently scanning the ground.
Then a woman with a worried look on her face, also carrying her day’s marketing, approached and stopped near me.
“They are looking for the P200 they dropped somewhere along this road, because they still had it when they bought charcoal under the acacia” [the century-old tree stands at the junction of the street where I live]. I really pity him [referring to the man with the black plastic bag]. I’m sure his wife will be angry.”
“I’m sure,” I replied, “even with prices rapidly increasing, P200 will still buy six to seven kilos of rice.”
“Not anymore,” she countered. “Look, I just bought 2 kilos at P40. It was all I could afford. I bought P10 more of cassava so there would be enough for all of us. With the price of rice now, the poor like us cannot survive anymore.”
With that she left, weighed down not so much by the contents of her bag, which didn’t look like much, but by what she thought was impending doom.
Trailing her were the two men who had given up their search, weighed down by the loss of what could spell the difference between eating and hunger.
Two days after that incident I went to the market and found out the price of rice had gone up to P45 a kilo.
Country Director Valerie Guarnieri of the UN World Food Program-Philippines has reminded the government not to stay focused on Metro Manila because the poor in Mindanao and elsewhere in the country are equally struggling with high food prices (“Don’t focus only on metro, UN food exec warns gov’t,” Inquirer, 6/7/08).
“The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao has no access to this subsidized rice so it is important that the government take a look at the [system] and make it effective,” she was quoted as saying in the same news article.
I also saw the tail-end of a line formed before a stall selling NFA rice. At 10 a.m. there was only enough supply left for the five or so people in the line.
The owner of our neighborhood store has just been accredited as an NFA retailer and the stock he was allocated this week was sold out in three days.
Most households here are not so bothered by the equally prohibitive cost of cooking gas because firewood stoves are usually an integral part of the kitchen.
My mother, who was a great cook and had almost every conceivable kitchen gadget for cooking and baking, never in her life bought a rice cooker, insisting that only firewood could cook rice to perfection.
It was only when I gave her a charcoal stove, made of iron, that she changed her mind. So cleverly made by Cebuano craftsmen, it has a lever for low, medium and high heat, and cooked rice to her kind of perfection. Now, 20 years later, it is still in perfect working condition and saves me from the high cost of LPG.
But even charcoal has doubled in price, or decreased by half in volume for the same price, whichever way you want to look at it.
The constant rains have delayed copra production and supply of coconut shells for charcoal has been scarce.
But of course it’s not just the supply. The steadily rising cost of fuel has affected the prices of even plentiful goods that have to be transported from the countryside—vegetables, coconuts, cassava, firewood, etc.—and from the sea.
Sometime last month the Moro National Liberation Front gathered in a much-hyped three-day meeting in Davao City headed by founder Nur Misuari and attended by some 30,000 members, where they “tackled” the 1996 GRP-MNLF peace accord, and reportedly discussed issues of empowerment, economic and political concerns and ARMM governance.
The meeting at least brought together Misuari and Muslimin Sema, erstwhile MNLF secretary-general who was elected chairman to replace Misuari, and their respective supporters, which could hopefully pave the way toward their reunification.
This is most crucial at this time when the constituency of the ARMM—so remote from Metro Manila where Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo chooses to run to and fro pasting Band-Aid on just about everything from “the poorest of the poor” to education, electricity, toll gate charges, etc., to stop the hemorrhage of social and political consequences of her “laser-beam” governance that focused only on covering up or deflecting attention from the venalities of her administration—is slowly but surely slipping into cynical desperation and debilitating helplessness over events beyond their control.
One can only hope that they discussed the “empowerment” of the constituencies of the ARMM and not just themselves, their kin and followers. That government will assist the people in surviving the food crisis with incentives for food production through technology, sustainable energy, agricultural inputs, farm-to-market roads, irrigation, etc., and to cope with spiraling prices through entrepreneurship with micro-financing, small and medium-scale enterprise loans, etc.
But first and foremost, they should very, very seriously discuss how they can, finally, solve the problem of loose firearms, particularly those in the hands of warlords and lawless groups, whatever their names.
Because the very inconvenient truth is, many point to them as responsible for bringing back the proliferation of guns after Ferdinand Marcos, through outright confiscation and other strategies and programs, almost totally eliminated them.
The struggle to survive is difficult enough. Without peace it will be impossible.
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