It didn’t take long for the aura of presidential activism on the rice shortage to evaporate and reveal that nothing at all has changed in the GMA regime we knew before this food crisis descended.
What a pity. With the prospect of massive hunger that has put our once resource-rich Philippines in a list of hard-luck countries, this crisis also brought with it a rare opportunity to correct basic flaws in the way we produce and procure our food, and the government policies, or lack of them, that have led to perennial under-performance. For a moment there, it seemed at least a possibility that the gravity of crisis had finally struck the fear of God in the heart of governance shallow when it’s not corrupt.
It didn’t. Clear evidence is how that P5 B “to address the crisis” has been programmed in an Ahon Pamilyang Pilipino (APP) program of monthly dole-outs – “P500 each to the 300,000 poorest families in the 20 poorest provinces plus P300 per child, with a maximum of three children per family.”
Inquirer columnist Neal Cruz projects: “This Ahon Pamilyang Pinoy (APP) program, contrary to expectations, will not lift poor families out of poverty. On the contrary, it will make them sink deeper…since (it) gives each of up to three children a monthly allowance of P500, won't couples with only one child want to have two more to take advantage of the maximum allowance for three children? Our population, now nearing 90 million, will explode further and our rice shortage will worsen.
“But let us assume that this P5-billion ‘conditional cash transfer’ to the poorest of the poor has the best of intentions. But isn't this the surest way, as Fr. Anton Pascual of Caritas Manila said, to encourage mendicancy and make the poor lazy and dependent on others? "
Standard columnist Tony Abaya has a similar reading but a slightly different tack: “Since almost all Filipino families have more than three children, that would amount to P420 million a month, or P5.04 billion in one year. If they were to start this program in April 2008, its budget of P5 billion would have been exhausted by April 2009.
“And then what?
“Having accustomed 300,000 poor families (or at least 1.8 million destitute people) to receiving monthly cash hand-outs for one year, without their doing an honest day’s work, can President Arroyo afford to stop?
“Of course not. She has to keep going. And because millions of other destitute people would be clamoring for their share - to the point of causing civil unrest in the face of escalating food and fuel prices - she would have to expand APP to cover, not just 300,000 families, but perhaps three million families, or even more.”
Abaya’s theory is that what’s about to begin is not emergency food aid but early election spending – pro-Gloria, not pro-poor. Chances are that both he and Neal Cruz are right.
Today, however, let’s go to another, related place of the big picture – Akbayan partylist representative Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel’s House Bill 1257 extending the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), approved in principle by the House of Representatives on the third week of April.
We are now on the crucial final month before CARP ends in June 2008, with HB 1257 under discussion in the House in the attempt to reconcile and consolidate an extension to finally complete the distribution of those 1.2 million hectares of agricultural land in the next five years.
There are several things to thresh out, but prime among them is a crucial sticking point related to the all the rest –whether or not to allow the use of distributed farmlands as loan collateral.
Baraquel, Akbayan and their NGO consortium stand is that they should not. Both experience and two years of consultation with farmers’ groups, academe, lending institutions and the agriculture bureaucracy have led them to conclude that farmlands as collateral is the best way for farmers to lose both the land and their livelihood.
They believe that the reason an estimated 25% of agrarian reform beneficiaries surveyed by DAR have lost the lands titled to them after a long, hard and historic slog is that borrowing money on their lands has been “a coping mechanism” that lost them everything.
What did the farmers have to cope with? Besides patches of bad weather, hardly any credit for ever more expensive seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and other farm expenses was made available by government, says Ernie Lim of Agrarian Reform Now, an NGO in the Akbayan consortium. What credit was given to new farmer landowners was way too small and difficult to access, he adds. Nor was there ever any training program or formal “capacity building” on handling credit for farmers who had never seen the kind of capital that borrowing on their land suddenly made possible. It’s no exaggeration to say: taking their newly acquired lands from some farmers was as easy as taking candy from a baby.
This is what makes Mrs. Arroyo’s statement two days after HB 1257’s approval in Congress truly worrisome: "If we want CARP to be successful, we must include a provision that allows farmers to use their agricultural lands for credit, otherwise, they will always be like informal sources, they will never become agri-businessmen."
A charitable interpretation of that would be a naïve presidential premise that owning land makes farmers automatically capable of doing business with loan sharks, agribusiness, mining concerns and the real estate interests that surround them and their land. That simply flies in the face of experience.
Most of us followed the saga of the Sumilao farmers. Here’s another, less known illustration of the hard ball that agrarian reform beneficiaries have been subjected to, not only by atavistic capitalists but a whole atavistic system, since CARP first became law.
With those 1.3 million hectares more awaiting distribution – in the specter of mass poverty and impending long-term food crisis for a whole nation – wouldn’t you say a new definition of terms, with the whole nation watching and participating, has become a matter of collective survival?
There’s more. We continue this next week.
Respond to: slmayuga@yahoo.com
