Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 23:41:00 04/21/2008
Politics could creep into the picture when the government begins selling rice at the cheap price of P18.25 directly to the poor, Social Welfare Secretary Esperanza Cabral has admitted. "There is no system that is perfect," Cabral told the Inquirer Sunday. The program can be used as a "political tool if the community will allow it, so vigilance is really important," she said.
Already straining under the burden of selling heavily subsidized rice to anyone who wants to buy it, the government has decided to pull its stocks out of the market and sell directly to the poor. Under the new distribution system, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) will identify the "poorest of the poor" with the assistance of local government units and give them "access cards" entitling them to buy cheap rice from the National Food Authority. By the DSWD's definition, the beneficiaries should be families earning not more than P4,500 monthly.
It is not an easy task to screen out the undeserving from the truly needy. Cabral herself has said there could be "leakages" in the new system as politicians and those who are in charge of the distribution accommodate relatives, friends and supporters. But the screening should be done well if the government wants to stretch its limited resources so that it can put food in the mouths of many among the millions of the country’s poor.
In the recent past, the government has not had much success in getting assistance to people who need it most. How badly it has done has been measured by Rosario Manasan and Celia Reyes of the Philippine Institute of Development Studies. Their study, which has been cited by Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Cielito Habito , focused on the reach of the Food-for-School and Tindahan Natin [Our Store] programs of the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration. (The first involves the distribution of one kilo of rice daily per deserving child so that he will keep attending school, while the second aims to provide rice, noodles and other staples to needy families to mitigate hunger.) It showed that 62 percent of people who received food assistance could not be categorized as poor while 66 percent of the beneficiaries of Tindahan Natin were not qualified to get such help. On the other hand, only 20 percent of the target beneficiaries of the Food-for-School program actually received assistance. Habito noted that the leakages (meaning government help falling into the hands of the non-poor and undeserving) was highest in Metro Manila at 71 percent for the Food-for-School Program and concluded that this was the price government had been paying for "political support from the more visible and more vocal constituencies."
There is nothing surprising there, given how President Arroyo has been employing every resource at her command to prop up her scandal-ridden administration and her presidency whose legitimacy continues to be challenged. In fact, the government's massive importation of rice at almost any price is widely believed to be part of the effort to keep her presidency afloat even as her approval rating continues to sink.
But the very seriousness of the rice emergency and the simmering dissatisfaction over escalating food prices may be giving pause to people in Malacañang who eat and breathe nothing but politics. Hence Cabral's cautionary statements about turning the distribution of cheap rice into another partisan exercise.
Still, that warning seems to be misdirected. The poor need no reminder to keep an eye on where cheap rice is going. They will easily know if rice from the National Food Authority (NFA) is being diverted into the tables of relatives and favored supporters of officials handling its distribution. But will there be many among the poor who will think of complaining? Certainly not if they know they are at the mercy of those who can put or take them out of the queue for cheap rice.
So for now, Cabral's warnings should be directed to officials, both in the NFA and DSWD and in the local government units. Although they may find it tempting to play politics with rice, just as they do with everything else, they should be told they can only push it so far. Partisanship may yet turn the hungry poor into angry mobs, sparking a kind of violence that may be difficult to control. Hunger knows no politics and the effort to ease hunger should be above politics.
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