RH Law has weak foundations

Defenders of the Law are frantically shifting to very questionable arguments about reducing teenage pregnancy and maternal mortality. As Nobel Laureate George Akerlof (now referred to as the husband of US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen) demonstrated empirically, the widespread information on and access to contraceptives in the 1960s resulted in the explosion in the number of single mothers and abortions in the United States. Akerlof coined the phrase “contraceptive shock” to refer to this phenomenon.

Proponents of birth control have even less ground to stand on when they try to revive the ghost of Thomas Malthus who, more than 200 years ago, predicted widespread famine because of food shortages. In a recent study of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which appeared in The Financial Times in June 2013, one of the 50 ideas that shaped business today was under the chapter on biotechnology. Together with information technology and material sciences, biotechnology will be one of the defining fields of research in the 21st century. In the subsection titled “High-Yield Agriculture,” the BCG analysts first made a direct reference to the first prophet of doom in economics: “In 1798 Thomas Malthus, the British theorist, postulated that the world’s population would eventually outstrip the planet’s ability to produce sufficient food for all, leading to widespread famine and death.”

Of course, as I learned from the famous economic historians of Harvard, that never happened during the centuries after Malthus. When I was taking my doctorate in the early 1960s, for a short period it seemed that Malthus was right, especially as regards India where increases in grain production did not keep pace with population growth. I remember that the then US ambassador to India, the famous economist John Galbraith who taught our development economics course at Harvard, was busy arranging for food aid for India. Fears of widespread famine were rampant after two droughts in the mid-1960s.

But what is the reality today? Were the pessimists proven right? The BCG report states: “Today, however, India is self-sufficient in food grain. The turnaround is the fruit of the Green Revolution, which brought high-yielding hybrid seeds and other high-tech, intensive farming techniques to millions of small farmers across Asia. The Green Revolution was driven by philanthropic organizations (Rockefeller and Ford Foundations), international agricultural research institutes that developed the new high-yielding seed varieties, and governments that ploughed money into fertilizers, irrigation networks and pesticides.”

We know only too well this phase of Asian economic history. The leading international rice institute was in our very midst in Los Baños, Laguna. Experts from all over Asia, especially the Thais and Vietnamese, came to the Philippines to benefit from the findings of the International Rice Research Institute funded by Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. They returned to their respective countries. Their governments had the wisdom and political will to shower their small farmers with everything needed to help them implement the learning they obtained from the Filipino and other international experts in Los Baños.

Our government under successive administrations did not build the farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, postharvest facilities and other rural infrastructures that were so generously provided to the small farmers by the Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian governments. Result? Our neighboring countries became huge exporters of agricultural products, especially rice.  We continued to suffer from large shortages of all sorts of staple crops. Clearly, the explanation is not the lack of technology or the lack of natural resources. As I have been crying out literally for decades, the culprit is the state’s criminal neglect of rural infrastructures.

Fortunately, since the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the government has done much to focus on countryside development, the major symbol of which is the Philippine nautical highway. The present administration is building on her accomplishments and trying to increase the ratio of infrastructure spending from the very low historical record of 2 percent of GDP to what is the average in the East Asian region—5 percent of GDP.

Who will feed China and other resource-poor nations? Among the best contenders are Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. If we persevere in building more adequate rural infrastructures—both hardware and software—we may join the next group of Southeast Asian countries that will replicate the Thai model of agribusiness development. I am referring to Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia and Laos, all well-endowed with agricultural resources.

There is no question that Southeast Asia, especially after the full integration of the Asean Economic Community, will be a major food belt for China and the other northeast territories of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Together with agribusiness behemoths like the United States, Brazil and Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, not only the Chinese can be fed at high levels of nutrition but also the other food-short regions of the world. With increased research in biotechnology, I am positive that 20 years from now, the food supply for the world will mirror what is already happening to the formerly critical input called petroleum. In the next five years, we shall see an oversupply of energy. One generation later, we shall see an abundance of food.

Bernardo M. Villegas ([email protected]) is senior vice president of the University of Asia and the Pacific.