MANILA, Philippines - The news, as summed up in yesterday’s Talk of the Town, is discouraging: For a variety of reasons, average food prices in the Philippines as in other parts of the globe are rising—and will continue to rise until about 2010. In the context of the latest poverty statistics released by the National Statistical Coordination Board, the news is worse than unwelcome. What can we do about it?

The Asia News Network report carried in Talk of the Town raised six reasons for the “surge” in food prices, including rising oil prices (which result in more expensive transportation rates) and supply disruptions.

An Agence France Presse report yesterday noted that the Philippines will import as much as 2 million tons of rice this year, at hundreds of dollars per ton. (Vietnam, where we source much of our imported rice, has been selling it recently for as much as $460 per ton—about twice the cost a mere year ago.)

And data from the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics show that chicken, beef and pork prices in the country in January 2008 were noticeably higher than in January 2007.

Two quick qualifiers. First, the executive director of the World Food Program said last week that the uptrend in prices will last only a few years. “Our assessment is that [prices will] in fact rise in 2008, 2009 and probably at least until 2010.” (An official of the Asian Development Bank agrees, saying “higher food prices are not a long-term phenomenon.”)

And second, the NSCB data compared the state of poverty in 2003 with 2006; in other words, we are dealing with the second three-year period of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s presidency. The parameters of the latest research allowed Augusto Santos, acting director general of the National Economic and Development Authority, to hope that, since the economy performed much better in 2006 and after, the beneficial effects of economic growth would have had a better chance of trickling down to the poor.

But there is no getting away from rising food prices.

The NSCB’s Official Poverty Statistics report for 2006 reveals that some 700,000 Filipino families were added to the ranks of the poor in the three years between 2004 and 2006. That brought the total, as of 2006, to 4.7 million families.

Many of those 700,000 families must have been impoverished by the continuing increase in food prices. “Higher prices in 2004 to 2006 may have hindered access to both food and nonfood basic needs and, hence, pushed some individuals/families down the poverty line,” Santos noted.

This has chilling immediate and long-term con-

sequences. The Asia News Network report pointed to an Indonesian study which found that when rice prices spike up, “mothers in poor families [respond] by reducing their caloric intake ... to better feed their children, leading to significant weight loss.” They also bought less of the more nutritious food for the children, “increasing the possibility of developmental damage.”

The NSCB report found that in the three years of the study period, some 200,000 families were added to the ranks of the “food-poor”—bringing the total to 1.9 million.

What can be done? In the short term, we must safeguard our supply of imported rice. Especially because of the higher prices, but also because it is a seller’s market, suppliers are loathe to tie themselves down to long-term contracts. Even at high rates, the National Food Authority must keep the import pipeline intact.

We must also increase output; this is the only reasonable long-term option. We will have to face difficult decisions, for instance between the need for energy self-sufficiency through biofuel crop cultivation and the need for food security. Part of the answer must lie in increased output.

We must also consider extending more subsidies to the most disadvantaged—especially for the rice consumption of the 1.9 million families considered food-poor.

Otherwise, there will be hell to pay. As Ferdinand Marcos proved in his first years in office, no politician can afford to be ignorant about the politics of rice.

“Every Asian government is well aware of the close relationship between political stability and the stability of the rice price,” an official of the UN Development Program told AFP. A word to the wise.