Gov’t policy undermines right to food security

As part of World Food(less) Day celebration last Oct. 16, the Philippine Network of Food Security Programmes Inc. reiterated its firm adherence to the call for “upholding our right to food.”

This year’s theme “Sustainable Food Systems for Food Security” echoes the call of farmers for genuine agricultural development. Yet the culprits behind agricultural “mal-development” are the ones who will be awarded with the Nobel Prize for Agriculture by the World Food Prize Foundation.

Monsanto and Syngenta have enslaved farmers worldwide to a profit-making technology that has wrought more hunger to food producers’ families and communities. Now, they are highly acclaimed to have found genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in crops, now widely protested by organizations internationally.

The Philippines is tagged as the most “GMO friendly” country in Southeast Asia for allowing field testing of Bt-talong, golden rice and other crop-testing, even clandestinely, in farming communities. Filipino farmers, scientists and progressive groups vehemently call for a stop to all GMO-related testings and urge legislators to enact a law to protect our farming systems from GMOs.

Ironically, eight out of 10 small farmers who till the land and produce food are landless and the hungriest. The promise of the planned “rice sufficiency in 2013” is marked by spiraling rice prices, huge volumes of smuggled rice, high rice importation, and the much-anticipated commercialization of golden rice in the Philippines. After the more than P700-million fertilizer scam in 2004, farmers are again victims of another, much bigger scam involving billions of pesos. The PDAF (Priority Development Assistance Fund) and DAP (Disbursement Acceleration Program) scandals have shown that the government has no serious intention to resolve the problem of hunger and persistent food insecurity in the country.

And the government continues to open our prime agricultural lands to vast land-grabbing by foreigners and to mining explorations. Our agricultural land used to cover 13 million hectares; now it is around 9 million hectares, reports say. The World Trade Organization says the Philippines is the Third World’s largest seller of farmlands to foreigners. This, while government has been callous to the clamor for genuine agrarian reform for farmer-tillers. Indigenous peoples continue to strongly protect and fight for their right to ancestral lands even when government has forced them to eviction. These antipeople policies and programs have indeed aggravated our state of food insecurity.

There will be no more sustainable food systems to speak of once harsh massive environmental destruction afflicts farming communities.

We call on all citizens to join us in our work to uphold our right to food security. We also support all actions calling for the abolition of the pork barrel system. We should demand the rechanneling of funds to social services, especially to address food insecurity and malnutrition. We are one with the millions of farmers marching for and demanding genuine agrarian reform!

—JHANA JUNE D. TEJOME, executive director,

Philippine Network of Food Security Programmes Inc.,

[email protected]