‘Go, tell the judge’

OUR COOK of 42 years never met Rep. Juan Miguel Arroyo. But she shares a beef with the Ang Galing Pinoy party-list representative who, if BIR Commissioner Kim Jacinto-Henares is correct, skipped reporting on wealth that ballooned 17 times in eight years.

Our cook didn’t ask about the net worth of “Mikey” and wife, Angela. Going by their Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs), the young Arroyos’ net worth bolted from P5.7 million in 2001 to P99.2 million in 2009. In those years, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was president.

“Mikey is right,” our household ‘chef’ insists. “Prices of food have risen. So has cooking gas. Everything. Everything.” She marshals market stall level data to back up her grouse.

“Suppose a governor spent P116,699 to host a meal?” we respond.

“Are you serious?” she replied.

So, we spread the Inquirer on the table. On Page A-21, the headline read: “COA: P1 billion of ARMM [Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao] fund wasted under Ampatuan.”

Gov. Zaldy Ampatuan’s office “spent P116,699 on one meal alone,” a special audit reports. The ARRM’s P1 billion disbursements had bogus documentation. Graft distorts food prices.

Social Weather Stations’ March survey reports that 4.1 million families went hungry, at least once, in the past three months. “Those who experience severe hunger increased from 588,000 to 950,000 families.”

That jarred President Aquino. With backing from the World Bank, USAID and Asian Development Bank, he targeted Conditional Cash Transfers to help the poorest 400,000 families. Another 1.3 million will be assisted in the coming weeks.

Welcome to what Worldwatch Institute’s Lester Brown calls in his new paper: “The Great Food Crisis of 2011.” And it won’t go away soon. Food prices, in fact, have been climbing upwards for over three years now. Except for a slight dip this month, noted by the Food and Agriculture Organization, high prices persist.

“Poor people now spend more than half of their income on food,” World Bank president Robert Zoellick says. “Rising global food prices pushed 44 million more people into extreme poverty in developing countries.”

“An empty belly hears nobody.” In Mozambique, 12 died in food riots last December. Clashes followed in Algiers over food cost spikes. In Iran, riot police poured into the streets after fuel and food subsidies ended. Chinese food costs rose 10.3 percent this quarter.

Middle East riots from Yemen to Syria—partly stoked by bolting food prices—started in Tunisia. There, 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze after police confiscated his handcart because he couldn’t afford bribes. “Dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali may be remembered as the despot toppled by a vegetable cart,” notes Bloomberg news agency.

Over 2 million Filipinos today work in the Middle East. National attention focused on OFW displacement due to armed clashes. But the more lethal long-term threat is the spreading water shortages.

Totally dependent on a now-depleted fossil aquifer, “Saudi Arabia’s wheat production is in free fall,” Brown notes. Irrigated areas in Syria, Iraq and Yemen are shrinking. Over-pumping produces grain for 175 million Indians and 130 million Chinese. Sooner rather than later, sucking aquifers dry will morph into rising food prices. And you cannot drink oil.

A third of the world’s cropland “is losing topsoil faster than new soil is forming,” he adds. “Two huge dust bowls are emerging.” One cuts across northwest China, western Mongolia and central Asia. The other is appearing in central Africa. “Each dwarfs the US dust bowl of the 1930s.” All impact food supplies.

Indeed, these supply-side factors mirror our constraints: Soil erosion here blights 45.6 percent of croplands. “Reversing soil erosion makes fighting insurgency seem like child’s play,” the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali once rued.

Our myth of abundant water is shot. Each Filipino has only 6,778 cubic meters available. Compare that to 26,105 cubic meters for Malaysians. Cebu City siphons double what its collapsing aquifer can recharge.

More cropland has been asphalted as 136 cities scramble for larger Internal Revenue Allotments, following the Supreme Court’s flip-flops on cityhood criteria. No “Second Green Revolution” seems to be emerging from Los Baños and other research centers.

New technologies to jack up harvests are drying up, Brown notes. Japan’s rice yields stagnated for 14 years. South Korea and China are approaching that level. “More than a third of the world rice harvest will soon be produced in countries with little potential for further raising rice yields.”

How many are there for whom the few loaves and fishes must be multiplied?

World population growth slowed to 1.2 percent last year. But earlier momentum means there are 219,000 additional mouths to feed—every single day.

Results of our seven-year delayed national census haven’t been released so far. President Benigno Aquino III, who took over a country of probably 93 million will hand to his successor a country of, maybe, 101.6 million Filipinos.

All these problems interlock with unpredictable weather change. As ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica melt and oceans warm, sea levels rise. A three-foot rise would inundate half of Bangladesh’s rice land and much of the Mekong Delta. Harvests in 19 other rice-growing river deltas in Asia would be devastated.

President Aquino has work cut out in crafting a food security policy. But a work in progress does not let tax welshers off the hook. If Mikey Arroyo and 38 other co-accused disagree, they can go, tell the judge.

(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com)