Food security depends on Pinoy farmers

It’s more than two decades already since the Philippines became one of the “founding members” of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Jan. 1,1995. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the WTO is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), an intergovernmental organization founded in 1948 whose rules created the modern multilateral trading system.

The WTO implements the Marrekesh Agreement that was signed by 124 nations on April 15, 1994, replacing the 1948 GATT. But it was only in December that same year that the Philippine Senate – during the 10th Congress – ratified our treaty commitments under the GATT-Uruguay Round. Then Senator Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo sponsored the ratification of the GATT-UR as the chairperson of the Senate committee on economic affairs.

The GATT-UR was ratified on a vote of 19 out of 24 Senators. One of the five “No” votes of this trade treaty was Senator Vicente “Tito” Sotto III who then made a very prophetic warning against the GATT-UR impact. “I prayed that I was wrong,” Sotto said at the end of his explanatory vote for “No.”  

Aside from Sotto, the other four “No” voters were former Senate minority leader Wigberto Tañada, the late Senators Arturo Tolentino and Ernesto Maceda, and former Senator Nikki Coseteng. A wisecracking ex-Senator Orlando Mercado (who voted “Yes” to ratify the treaty) came up with an analysis of the “No” votes of these five Senators. According to Mercado, each voted according to their beliefs: A constitutionalist, the late Sen. Tolentino cast a “constitutional No;” Tañada, who represented the views of the left-leaning groups against the GATT-UR, cast an “ideological No.” Maceda, a staunch opposition leader in the Senate, voted a “political No.” Sotto, representing the concerns of the entertainment industry on GATT-UR’s infringement into intellectual property rights, voted a “showbiz No.” But the usually articulate Mercado suddenly found himself dumbfounded on how to classify the vote of Coseteng, except saying “I don’t know (No).”

Fast forward. The Senate president and the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the 17th Congress are currently, Sotto and Pampanga Congresswoman Arroyo, respectively.

Through these past years though, the Philippines has been able to forestall the full enforcement of the GATT-UR on selected agriculture products from coverage of liberalized trading required among all its members. An annual review of the GATT-UR allowed such exemption of certain sectors under the transition phase for less developed and developing countries like the Philippines.

The transition period is given to enable these countries come up with so-called “safety nets” to cushion the impact to vulnerable sectors of each economies under the borderless, globalized trading system among WTO signatory countries. It is supposed to level the playing field for less developed and developing countries with WTO members of industrialized and rich countries.

These led to subsequent trade negotiations called as the Doha Round where WTO members discussed ways of common grounds to cushion the severe impact of full liberalization to “fragile economies.” The Doha Round, which began in 2001 held in Qatar, got stalled following disagreements over the rich nations’ granting of subsidies to certain sectors of their economies that would be affected by trade liberalization and protect them from possible dislocation.

Being progressive and much advanced economies, naturally these rich WTO members could heavily subsidize their products that could not be matched by poorer countries which are bound by the treaty on tariff and quota reduction and removal of non-tariff and non-quota restrictions.

Initially, the succeeding Congress passed into law the Agricultural and Fishery Modernization Fund (AFMA) that provided huge amounts of annual budget for these vulnerable sectors of agriculture, fishery and local industries. After the AFMA, the next Congress came up with the Agricultural Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (ACEF).

The AFMA and the ACEF were designed to finance these “safety nets” to protect our local farmers and fisherfolk by making them competitive during the transition period with the freer entry into the country of imported rice and other agricultural products.

What does our country’s agriculture have to show for it? All these monies poured were for naught.

Our farmers are still drying palay and other agriculture products up to now along our national highways.

No wonder our country’s agriculture growth has gone down to alarming low. From 3% in the third quarter of 2016 when President Rodrigo Duterte came into office, it declined to 2.6% in the same quarter in 2017. For the third quarter of this year, agriculture posted minus 0.4% growth. It was much worse performance from the immediately preceding second quarter record of minus 0.2% growth.

Now, the leaders of the 17th Congress tell us the proceeds of the Rice Tariffication bill – once passed into law – would be plowed back to agriculture sector. The bill was also aimed at averting sanctions from the WTO if the country does not do away with quantitative restrictions on rice and convert to tariff protection.

The Senate approved last week the bill, principally authored by Senator Cynthia Villar, which amends Republic Act 8178 or the Agricultural Tariffication Act, by removing the import quotas on rice and replace it with a 35 percent tariff. The Lower House already passed its version last August.

President Duterte has certified this measure as urgent administration bill as the government continues to grapple with inflation woes, much of which was caused by high prices of rice and other food items. Duterte economic managers earlier estimated liberalizing rice imports will reduce the retail price of rice by P4 to P7 per kilo and reduce inflation rate by at least 0.4 percentage points.

If we are to believe official statistics, there are less than four million Filipino farmers in our total population. But all 100 million of us Filipinos depend on them for our country’s food security.