Agriculture’s woes

More NFA officials and employees are being suspended for their scandalous cheap rice deal. Will there be any honest staff left when the investigation is over?

Everyone is experiencing inflation. Rice is basic for our people, its price not exempted from inflation. Our poor are hardly able to eat each day.

Yet, as soon as cheaper rice was available, instead of prioritizing its sale to the needy poor, the cheaper rice is sold instead by NFA to certain rice dealers.

Goodness!

Heads should definitely roll.

Imagine the shameless act of depriving our poor and hungry of their needed supply of cheaper rice.

Imagine the hardship that irresponsible act of the NFA inflicted on the ordinary Filipino struggling each day to provide cheaper food sufficient for their household!

Imagine the enormous loss of at least P112 million after that sale of 150,000 bags of rice at only P25 per kilo to selected traders, according to Jayson Cainglet, Executive Director of Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura!

Imagine as well the embarrassment NFA caused their former Agriculture Secretary who is also the presidential candidate who promised, if he won, that the price of rice would be down to P20 per kilo. That former candidate is now President and was the big boss of those in NFA until the new Agriculture

Secretary was appointed.

Because of this recent blatant dishonesty of the greedy in NFA, now everyone knows the “long-known open secret” about corruption in NFA!

A media interview noted that NFA seems to have had this practice of declaring good rice as “rotten” which is sold at very cheap prices to conniving traders.

So, this recent NFA fiasco is not the only occasion that NFA deprived our poor/hungry their fair share of cheaper and good rice?

Was NFA previously selling and still continuing to sell “good rice declared as rotten” at cheaper prices to select traders?

What other open secrets of NFA need to be exposed publicly?

Who are these privileged traders?

Shouldn’t these conniving traders also be included in the investigation and if needed, be just as duly punished for depriving our people funds as well as their long-deserved cheaper rice?

Rice importation has its share of corruption as well, we are told.

Imagine how many of our farmers stand to lose every time government decides to import.

Rather than import, why doesn’t government instead provide ample support/subsidy to our farmers so they produce sufficient rice supply for our own people, for our country?

We are told that local rice prices may drop soon because of expected rice harvest this season. If there is excess rice import that will compete with our domestic farmers’ rice harvest, guess who stands to lose?

Won’t the rice imports compete unfairly with our local farmers’ harvest? Won’t our farmers be paid less than what they spent for because of available rice import?

Why couldn’t NFA/DA have done their assignment and with good research, map out the supply of crops, time of planting/harvest, farming costs, and determine fair prices for our farmers?

Is it possible, despite good research, the results could have been ignored/bypassed because of the existing open secret of corruption in NFA and perhaps other partners in other government agencies as well?

Philippine agriculture woes go beyond corruption and unfair, dishonest rice dealing of the greedy and corrupt in government agencies and their partners.

Historically, agriculture has not been given priority attention and support by a government of landowning/business elites who favored export crop production, industrialization, and foreign partners/investors over our basic food crop producers.

Observe how the present legislators are rushing to change the charter to allow more foreign investors in!

Sadly, nothing has changed really.

Social inequality, corruption and bad governance, preference for foreign partners rather than the interests of our poor/hungry remain, beyond, not only in agriculture.