Sufficiency

Published by the Visayan Daily Star Publications, Inc.

NINFA R. LEONARDIA Editor-in-Chief & President

CARLA P. GOMEZ Editor GUILLERMO TEJIDA III Desk Editor NANETTE L. GUADALQUIVER Busines Editor CEDELF P. TUPAS Sports Editor (On Leave) RENE GENOVE Bureau Chief, Dumaguete MAJA P. DELY Advertising Coordinator

CARLOS ANTONIO L. LEONARDIA Administrative Officer

A country as dependent on rice as the Philippines should not be a net importing country when it comes to that basic component of every Filipino meal.  In this volatile and fast growing world where the prices of goods like oil, and now rice, in the global market have hit their highest levels in decades, Filipinos, who eat roughly 11.9 million metric tons of rice every year, should not be content with producing only 92 percent of the rice that they consume.

The government is currently insisting that reports of a looming rice shortage are inaccurate, pointing to the current lack of physical queues as proof of our country’s self sufficiency with regards to rice.  However, we cannot simply ignore that the signs that the supply of rice in the world market has been shrinking, especially in the light of the decisions of the world’s two biggest rice producers, Vietnam and India, to freeze exports.  That kind of uncontrollable global development does not bode well for a country that is planning to import as much as 2.4 million metric tons of rice this year.

We will never be able to control the nuances of the global rice market, and that is why we should exert a more conscious effort to undertake a successful rice sufficiency program that will allow us to become less dependent on imports of our staple food, just so we can feed ourselves.  Our country is blessed with fertile lands, and used to be one of the leaders in the region when it came to rice production. In fact, we still take pride in the fact that during that time, other countries would send their experts to the Philippines to learn from us the secrets of planting rice.   We may have been overtaken and left behind since then, but the need for self-sufficiency, especially when it comes to our staple food, has not changed and in fact has become even more critical these days. 

A government that makes self-sufficiency a priority will be able to deal with nasty rumors of shortages more convincingly than one that is still dependent on importation.*