Cause for cheer

EDITORIAL CARTOON

THE RAINS, seemingly arriving now with greater force and frequency, have conditioned us to expect disaster of some sort or the other to come in their wake. Our experience with Storm “Ondoy,” and lately  “Bebeng” and its interminably soggy trek through the southern provinces, reflexively conjure images of flooding, landslides, widespread damage to crops and property, not to mention the inconvenience of living through inclement weather, as soon as the skies darken and the air crackles with the approach of yet another storm.

But the watery fate we have been enduring in the last few months turns out to have a silver lining, after all. The Department of Agriculture recently announced that, helped along by heavy rains, Philippine agriculture grew 4.10 percent in the first quarter of the year—the fastest such growth since 2004 and a clear reversal of the number from the same period last year, which saw agricultural output actually decline by 2.84 percent.

The rice sector’s improvement, for starters, was “unprecedented,” in the words of Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala. The 15.63 percent increase, equivalent to 4.03 million metric tons of palay harvested, represents “the highest rice volume we have seen since Filipinos started planting rice.” The higher palay production accounted for 52.99 percent of the total farm output in the first quarter.

Corn was up 19.50 percent to 1.915 million metric tons, while sugarcane grew at 26.73 percent to 12.747 million metric tons. The livestock and poultry sectors could post only minimal growth of 0.59 percent and 3.92 percent, respectively. But only the fisheries industry, battered by the twin calamities of typhoons and overfishing, registered negative growth, with output falling by 3.49 percent.

These are not idle numbers. Already, the higher palay output has presented the government a chance to cut costs on rice importation, which last year reached a record volume of 2.45 million metric tons. Scandalously, the Philippines, once a model country for growing and breeding the crop, has become the world’s biggest rice importer in recent years, its steep slide from self-sufficiency extracting a high price as much of its staple food no longer come from its farmlands but from a world market where supplies and prices are beyond its control. But now, thanks to the higher rice yield, imports for 2011 have been reduced to just about a third of last year’s volume.

If palay output continues to grow, it could bode well for the Aquino administration’s key mid-term goal of rice sufficiency, said Alcala. Farm output, in turn, which comprises a fifth of the country’s Gross Domestic Product, is expected to play a major part in the Philippines’ ability to achieve its economic growth target of 7-8 percent for 2011.

This being the case, the mandate for Alcala and the Department of Agriculture is clear: Make sure the “unprecedented” palay harvest in the first quarter of the year is not a one-off aberration, a fluke or a product of luck, but a result that can be sustained, supported, replicated and built upon in the coming quarters and years. Obviously, ample rains, while having unexpectedly favored the agricultural sector this year, are a fickle base on which to anchor the country’s dream of self-sufficiency. The changing, erratic weather we have been seeing for years now—with long periods of drought followed by calamitous torrential downpours—requires rethinking the traditional conditions under which local agriculture has operated.

While sufficient rainfall is largely out of the government’s control, it does have ways of helping the farming sector in critical areas. Alcala, for instance, has also credited the repair and rehabilitation of irrigation systems across the country with helping nudge the sector upwards. Well and good—and it is hoped such efforts do not fall by the wayside anytime soon. Now as ever, farmers also need better access to tools and technology, to up-to-date information on improved farming methods and sustainable resource development, to more beneficial trading spaces and practices.

And those perennial basics: good roads, good markets, good policy-making—the assurance that when it comes to the fundamental responsibility of feeding a nation, the sector can count on the government to lend it full support. In the blizzard of bad news lately on the political front, the report that the country’s farmlands are yielding good harvests again is a cause for cheer. The agriculture department better make sure it’s not short-lived.