Rice, rice baby (Em)

The Philippines has once more been facing the continued price increases in basic commodities, particularly the price of rice, for the past year and a half. And, just like the issue on sugar and onion prices, the government today already has decades of experience and data from previous administrations from which they could have learned. The same issues of rice cartels, rice pests, typhoons, and other natural calamities, and depleted stocks in the localities, tend to be given every time the price of rice goes up, and yet nothing has changed over the years. So how much were rice prices, back then?

In 1902, the government already discovered rice cartels being formed in Manila. This syndicate caused for rice prices to soar, so the government subsidized the farmers and importers to get the price down. The continuous price increases caused public order issues and the masses were the most affected. By 1918, the governor-general lifted import duties on rice entering the Philippines but mandated that the Bureau of Commerce and Industry decide which places in the country these rice go to. These imported rice were not allowed to be sold just anywhere so they will not compete with local produce. The government also decided at which price these imported rice was sold. That year, the price of local rice was ?10.70 and ?10.90 per sack (containing 57.5 kilos). As of July 1919, rice was selling at ?17 to ?20 per sack. This means that the price of rice per kilo was as low as ?0.19 in 1918 and as high as ?0.35 a year later. A big part of the 1920 report of the American governor-general of the Philippines was a discussion of the rice crisis in the country. According to the report, whenever the stock of rice became depleted, rice cartels hoarded their stocks, waiting for the inevitable spike in rice prices. Some of the actions done by the government in 1920 were to 1.) “Investigate” the situation, 2.) To do everything in their power to lower the price of rice, and 3.) Continue monitoring the stocks of rice. When one reads these solutions without knowing what year it was from, one could almost be reading it in today’s newspapers.

After World War II, the price of rice continued to skyrocket. In early March 1946, it was ?1.20 per ganta, or ?0.50 a kilo. By the end of March, it increased by almost half to ?0.74 per kilo. By 1958, it was within ?0.51 - ?0.75 a kilo. An international report about the world food crisis in 1968 stated that the Philippines and Indonesia were the most seriously affected by the shortage of rice, due to continued population explosion, the inability to grow enough food for their population, and continued heavy reliance on rice importation. And while the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) was found in the Philippines, local farmers were unable to benefit from the institute’s discoveries due to backlash from traditional farmers and because of the government’s inability to provide funding and support.

Fast forward to 1974, the retail price of rice was between ?1.70 to ?1.90 per kilo. In the early 1980s, it was ?6.10 to ?6.40. By 1999, it was still between ?10.00 - ?11.25 per kilo. Between 1999 to the early 2000s, rice prices were an average of ?7.50 - ?8.00, with fluctuations here and there. The next few years’ rice prices per kilo were: 2008 (?25.67 - ?39.76), 2014 (?39.49 - ?44.02), 2018 (?43.12 - ?45.83), and 2019 (?30.00 - ?42.00).

President Marcos’s campaign promise to bring down the price of rice to as low as ?20 - ?30 if he won has now been put to question, because instead of going down, rice prices now range from ?46 to ?65 per kilo for imported rice and ?40 to ?62 for local rice. While our history has shown that rice prices have a tendency of going up and down, and the reasons are also the same in most instances, it does not change the fact that every new administration has volumes of data from the past from which they should have already learned. And, unfortunately, the higher the price of rice goes, most Filipinos’ salary has continued to stagnate, thereby decreasing their purchasing power.

Is this really the promised Bagong Pilipinas?