Is food self-sufficiency the right goal?

During Manny Villar’s visit at the offices of Philippine Star, one of the things he said he will do quickly is get the country self-sufficient in food. I wondered if he knew what he was talking about or was just saying something a lot of people want to hear even if it is an erroneous policy of past administrations.

Manny sounded as if it was easy to conjure self-sufficiency by simply putting up or repairing rural agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation canals. But then again, Villar is not alone among the presidential candidates who seem to think food (translated as rice) self sufficiency is the way to go.

Perhaps it would help them to seek the counsel of our agri-business experts such as Dr. Rolly Dy of the University of Asia and the Pacific. They will realize after sitting down with Dr. Dy for even half an hour that the next President should think out of the box if they want to help the agriculture sector and lift our rural folk out of poverty.

It was timely that when Villar visited the Tuesday Club the day after his PhilStar interview, Agriculture Secretary Art Yap was also there. Yap gave us some quick facts and figures to put the “self sufficiency” part of the platforms of the various candidates in proper perspective.

Yes, Art said, you need some level of self-sufficiency at a time when prices of basic food commodities are going up in the world market, thanks to weather change. But don’t put all your eggs in that basket because it is not going to happen at once (within the first 100 days) and it is not going to get your rural folks out of poverty. The new President will need a combination of policies to perk the agri sector and at the core of those policies is the need to make farming profitable for farmers.

Just to show the magnitude of the task at hand, Art said only 48 percent of our rice lands are now irrigated. We need to irrigate at least a million hectares more at P800,000 a hectare. In this regard, the repair and rehabilitation of infrastructure in irrigated lands will cost about P75,000 per hectare and we need to cover five percent of irrigated land per year in this program plus the backlog of about 150,000 hectares that have not been repaired in the past 25 years.

That brings up a point that Dr. Dy discussed in his recently launched book, Food for Thought. We lack the comparative advantage of Thailand and Vietnam in the cultivation of rice. These countries and Burma as well, have large river systems that provide the water needs of growing rice over a large land area. In a recent conversation I had with Dr. Dy, he commented that even what looks to us like the mighty Cagayan River looks like an estero compared to the Mekong, the Chao Phraya or the Irrawaddy for instance.

This is not to say that rice self-sufficiency cannot be achieved. Rafael Salas did it for a brief period in the 1960s. In fact, Philippine agriculture, Dr. Dy pointed out, performed notably only in the 1960s and 1970s in the sense that it kept pace with its peer countries. Those were the years the late Rafael Salas launched and managed the Green Revolution by massively spending on rural infrastructure such as roads and irrigation and introducing new high yielding rice varieties.

At the heart of the Salas Green Revolution are seeds of new high yielding rice varieties developed in Los Baños. If we are to replicate what he did, Secretary Art Yap said we will also need new technology to give us seeds that will produce crops that will survive flooding and are also drought resistant. But it will also be necessary for any self-sufficiency program to make sure that farmers are given the incentives to plant rice… to make rice farming profitable.

In this regard, Secretary Yap thinks we should reform the NFA. He wants NFA to get out of the price stabilization role it presently plays. “Whenever NFA overly intervenes in distributing cheap rice, it pressures farm gate palay prices downward and makes palay farming less attractive because it is less profitable, if at all.” Yap wants market forces to prevail and to help the poor consumers, specially in the urban areas, Yap suggests assigning subsistence rice distribution to the DSWD.

Going back to Villar, at least he realizes that doing something for the agricultural sector is a top priority because that affects a large chunk of our population who are now mired in rural poverty. It need not be that way, a World Bank report pointed out.

“Philippine agriculture has the potential for higher growth through crop diversification, but traditional low-value commodities continue to dominate production (and land use). At the same time, dynamic high-value products with high export potential and income growth, such as tropical fruits, are not provided with the sufficient level of government support to generate significant benefits for the sector and beyond.”

Dr. Dy blames our lagging behind our Asean peers on a misguided rice self-sufficiency program. He cites the case of Malaysia to bolster his case. “In 1982,” he recalled, “Malaysia, a resource-rich country which can afford to pay the hefty price of self-sufficiency, launched its first national agricultural policy. In this policy, three strategic directions stood out: (a) the country will reduce its rice self-sufficiency target to 65 percent from 90 percent; (b) marginal rice lands will be converted to more profitable crops, particularly oil palm; and (c) the country will import its rice gap from neighboring Thailand.”

“As things turned out, Malaysia’s strategic direction proved to be the correct one. There has never been any news of food shortages in that country as income security, not rice self-sufficiency, was the over-riding strategy. Its massive investments in developing 4.5 million hectares of oil palm and the downstream industries led to rapid reduction in rural poverty.”

The problem in our case is not just that we had a rice self-sufficiency program; our government failed to support its own self-sufficiency policy to give it a chance to succeed. Indeed, our leadership position in coconut, for example, had been vastly eroded by corruption and neglect. Agrarian Reform complicated the problems we already had.

And that is why for our rural folks, farming has condemned them to a life of perpetual poverty. It was all a pity because as Dr. Dy points out, the World Bank has underscored the high growth and poverty reduction potential of Philippine agriculture.

Our underperformance in agriculture, according to the World Bank report cited by Dr. Dy, was essentially due to “a weak policy environment and public expenditure” which do not encourage growth and competitiveness in the sector. “Farm incomes have kept lagging non-farm incomes, mainly because of the low agricultural productivity and the slow out-migration from the sector.”

 If Mr. Villar and the other presidential candidates care to get their agricultural platforms beyond platitudes, they should get a copy of Dr. Dy’s book and study his insights. Dr. Dy even ends his book with a very proper and timely epilogue in the form of a memo to the next President.

 The going will be difficult, Dr. Dy warns, but the pay-offs will be huge if the next President makes the right decisions. He then makes a number of suggestions, including the need for transparency specially for NFA which he thinks, should just be a logistics provider. Good governance, he explains, is not merely giving away money for farm-to-market roads, production support, irrigation, postharvest facilities and seeds. It involves knowing the impact of these programs on farmers’ profits and on the country’s competitiveness.

In other words, the next President must make it worthwhile for farmers to stay in farming so that food production goals can be achieved. If some of our farm lands that are not irrigated are only capable of mediocre rice production, perhaps it would be better to see what other cash or high value crops are better suited. Our agriculture policies must ensure food on all our tables and get a large number of our people out of poverty. That’s the bottom line.

Eraption

Rosan Cruz texted this Erap joke.

Asked what impressed him most after a visit to SeaWorld, Erap said: “It’s d 1st time I have seen an octopus up close. I never realized it had so many testicles.”

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. This and some past columns can also be viewed at www.boochanco.com <http://www.boochanco.com>