Stagnation

Summertime… and the drying is easy.

For rice farmers, the scorching summer is the perfect season for laying their palay on paved roads to dry.

The practice has been banned for several years now due to road safety concerns, with violators facing a fine of P1,000 and imprisonment of up to six months.

But for farmers with no access to mechanized drying facilities, or who find the drying service rates too steep, a hot pavement is the most practical and economical means of drying their palay after harvest before milling.

In some areas, rice dehusking and winnowing are still done manually, again due to the inaccessibility or high cost of mechanized post-harvest facilities.

Such scenes of mano-mano processing from palay to rice are still common in the countryside. Those who will resume traveling outside the cities this Holy Week will see those scenes, which look picturesque, but in fact highlight the stagnation in Philippine agriculture, and the sad truth behind the ditty about planting rice not being fun, magtanim ay ’di biro.

Since Ferdinand Marcos the elder launched land reform for rice and corn lands in the 1970s, beneficiaries have been promised farm support services – from fertilizer and pesticide subsidies to sufficient irrigation, post-harvest facilities and marketing support.

Yet until a few years ago, we were still seeing Filipinos waiting in long, snaking lines for a chance to buy a few kilos of rice at prices lower than the prevailing high costs.

The answer to this insecurity in the country’s staple food was open importation and tariffication. Farmers worried about their livelihoods being killed by the flood of cheap imports were reassured that the tariffs would go to a fund that would finance all those support services promised to them since the first Marcos presidency.

Those farmers drying their palay on the pavement in San Rafael, Bulacan give you an indication of where the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund is going.

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Announcing the expansion of Kadiwa outlets last week, President Marcos said he was inching toward realization of his aspiration for rice at P20 a kilo.

That sounds like the declaration of trade officials last year that the retail price of sugar at regular outlets had gone down, when in fact the price softened slightly only for washed sugar rather than refined white. Any regular consumer of sugar knows washed sugar is priced lower than white.

As of last Saturday, white refined sugar was being retailed at P105 a kilo at a large supermarket near my home, and P95 at the wet market.

The election campaign is long over so the government should give public deception a rest. Consumers across income and education levels are not fooled when it comes to food pricing.

The government must also come clean on the sugar import authorization awarded to three lucky groups ahead of approval by the Sugar Regulatory Administration. The limited importation allows the three groups control over supply and distribution of sugar, whose sky-high prices have barely moved since last year.

The President-cum-agriculture secretary announced that his campaign promise of P20-a-kilo rice was at hand even as his government reported an average increase of P4 per kilo for rice retailed at regular outlets.

Last month at my suki rice wholesaler, the cheapest regular milled rice variety was priced at P37 per kilo for a 25-kilo sack.

As in the case of sugar, small-scale rice farmers complain of being squeezed at the farm gate. How much will they be paid, they ask, for palay if the government retails rice at P20 a kilo?

Rice at P25 a kilo is available only at Kadiwa outlets. Proponents of rice tariffication, which did stabilize supply and bring down rice prices, said even rice farmers are rice consumers so they would also benefit from lower prices of the staple.

When tariffication was being discussed by policy makers, some officials in the previous administration said they weighed the number of people who would be adversely affected by open importation against the number of people who stood to benefit from the expected lowering of rice prices.

Consumers overwhelmingly outnumbered the rice farmers, the officials said. It was time, they stressed, to ease protectionist policies in the agriculture sector and compel local producers to compete.

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That protectionism can use some nuancing. The policies can be eased for the major players in the agriculture supply chain, who buy produce dirt cheap at the farm gate and operate storage facilities, logistics and distribution networks, allowing them to control supply and prices in the market.

Marginal players, however, including agrarian reform beneficiaries, cannot be left to fend for themselves, floundering in the shark-infested waters of a globalized economy where other countries pour resources into supporting their domestic agriculture sector. Even several advanced economies continue to protect or provide certain forms of support to their marginal farmers and other micro food producers.

Small-scale producers of many of our food crops including onions, tomatoes and carrots are helpless enough in dealing with bulk buyers at the farm gate as well as cold storage and logistics providers.

Local government units are supposed to provide assistance to their farming communities. But in many areas, local government officials and their families themselves or their cronies are part of the system that exploits marginal food producers and prevents farmers from becoming competitive.

Proposals for “one village, one product” or crop have been tossed around for years, but have yet to get off the ground.

The Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund is supposed to help make farmers competitive and modernize rice production.

Tariffication and the flood of imports did pull down rice prices. But the other aspect of the program – to make local rice farmers competitive – is stuck in the realm of aspiration.