War footing?

“COST OF fish, chicken and vegetables are up,” our cook told the wife.

“Does that confirm this report?” I butted in, flagging the Asian Development Bank paper: “Global Food Price Inflation and Developing Asia.”

“Wait until I add our grocery bill,” the wife replied.

“Hunger knows no friend but its feeder,” Aristophanes warned. Thus, Radyo Inquirer came on line to discuss ADB’s findings. “Food prices have become highly volatile,” the report asserts. “Asia’s food systems’ vulnerability to price shocks increased significantly.”

Interlinked causes include: bolting oil prices, low national priority for food security, natural calamities. (Think typhoon “Ondoy.”)

Food price spikes press-ganged over 44 million people into poverty in developing countries, the World Bank notes. “The stress is … on the most vulnerable,” WB Group president Robert Zoellick warns. “(They) spend more than half of their income on food.”

More will be affected. “About a third of the increase in global food prices gets transmitted to domestic food prices” here, ADB adds. “A 10-percent rise in domestic prices, in developing Asia, risks creating an additional 64.4 million poor people.”

Rep. Manny Pacquiao flays the Reproductive Health bill while Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago backs it. Whoever wins, the slow decline in fertility rates ensures the headcount around Filipino dinner tables will remain high.

Population this year will exceed 91.3 million, up from 48 million in 1980. Youngsters will predominate. Almost 57 percent are below the age of 20. In this “youth bulge,” many are jobless. The country must double the number of homes, schools, clinics and food just to stay put in this demographic treadmill.

About 4.1 million families go hungry, Social Weather Stations reported early this year. “For a rich man, the right time to eat is when one is hungry,” a Mexican proverb says. “To a poor man, when there is something to eat.”

Soil erosion, salination and urban sprawl cut into food production. So do lack of investment and patchy farm or fishing services. Wrecking of reefs, seabeds and illegal fishing—as in the once bountiful Visayas Triangle—could result in “empty seas,” warn Magsaysay Awardees Angel Alcala and Antonio Oposa.

“As much as 40 percent of developing Asia will face severe water shortages by 2030,” the bank says. “Demand for water continues to increase, not just to produce more food, but to sustain cities and industries…”

Some countries launched food-based safety net programs. (The Aquino administration operates, for example, a Conditional Cash Transfer Program that targets the poorest families.) “If prices continue to rise, the considerable cost of subsidies makes them unsustainable in the long run…”

World food reserves are rapidly being drawn down, UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization cautions. Prices of crude oil and food rose by 30 percent in the first quarter of this year. Our cook won’t like this. But “in the short term, high and volatile prices will be a continuing trend…”

As a result, the purchasing power of households will erode. “These could undermine poverty reduction and human development gains achieved over the last decade…. Food spikes increased in frequency…. Short- and long-term solutions need to be implemented (urgently).”

Yield-growth in politically incendiary crops, like rice, must surge by 1.2 percent to 1.5 percent, over the next decade, International Rice Research Institute estimates. That’d barely keep abreast with growing demand.

For now, the price of rice is “relatively stable,” World Bank notes. But that’s due to Bangkok’s release of large stocks onto the market. And Manila has pared down its rice imports.

The National Food Authority, meanwhile reels from a Commission on Audit report that it dissipated $2.3 billion in rice purchase losses. Under President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s watch, the NFA “bought high, sold low and stored long.” The agency’s IOUs, as a result, ballooned to $4.1 billion or around P100 billion.

Food cupboards, however, are not stocked by rhetoric. “Over the long term, the need is for sustainable food production,” ADB argues. “Supply augmenting measures must be implemented on a war footing.” (Underscoring supplied)

There is elbow room to boost yields. Filipinos harvest less than four tons of rice per hectare. That’s “less than half the maximum yield of 9.8 tons achieved, during the last decade, by Egypt.” In Asia, only Japan, China, Vietnam and Indonesia “exceeded the global mean…”

There’s no secret about how to secure food security. We must trim, for instance, pork barrel and “Lakbay Aral” junkets, as Local Government Secretary Jesse Robredo sensibly suggested. Instead, we must invest scarce tax pesos in essentials, like agricultural research and development.

Post-harvest losses can be cut; irrigation and farm-to-market roads improved; and soil erosion, which blights over 54 percent of farm land, reversed.

Such measures would benefit “Asia’s major producers,” ADB says. Paradoxically, they are the small farmers and coastal fishermen.

“It is unfair that those who produce the food suffer hunger the most,” Malaysian agriculture minister Datuk Hussein Onn once wrote. “They must acquire access to tools for production—and a just share in the food they raise.… A permanent solution to hunger rests with the small farmer, landless laborer and small fisherman. No one else.”

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