| Photo by Lara Eventide on Unsplash
The rising cost of food affects everybody, and we need to be aware that there are many processors and traders adding their markup to the price of food from the grower to the consumer. That’s why growing your own vegetables is a great way to save money and guarantee they are fresh and organic for a healthier life. If we eat Philippine rice, then it was likely grown by some of the 2.4 million poor Filipino rice farmers, and they earned an average of 285 to 331 pesos a day growing and harvesting it. That is US$6 a day. Is that fair earning?
Why is rice so expensive, causing hunger?
The Philippine population is 115 million, and 14.2 percent or 17 million Filipinos go hungry most days, according to a survey by the Social Weather Station (SWS) released this year. Many of the very poor just eat a handful of cooked rice and soya sauce or a piece of small fish. Others in the cities eat “pag-pag,” a stew of re-cooked scraps from the uneaten dinners of restaurant customers. The greed of the corrupt tycoons and elite that control the Philippine food supply, especially rice, and the politicians that enable it are to blame for hunger and the super high price of rice.
Hunger is the fuel of revolution, as has happened recently in Bangladesh. Tyrannical rule by the rich elite for 15 years was overthrown by a short-lived peaceful revolution and street demonstrations for social justice, during which the Bangladesh military killed more than 200 protesters and forced the prime minister to quit and flee abroad. Mohammad Yunus, a civic leader and founder of the grassroots Grameen Bank, was invited by the student-leaders of the revolution to head an interim government.
The fact is that so many Filipinos are hungry and despairing of a better life in a nation of 79,000 Filipino ($) millionaires and 18 Filipino ($) billionaires who don’t seem to share their wealth to alleviate poverty and hunger. This indicates the level of great inequality that is causing hunger in the Philippines.
Tasting the rice grown by the suffering farmers might satisfy our physical hunger. Still, we need to hunger for justice and equality, feel compassion for the victims of social injustice and government corruption, and take social action. We can join a movement or non-government organization working for social justice and farmers’ or Indigenous people’s rights.
Suppose you strive to be a true Christian and believe that goodness and action for social justice will overcome greed, inequality, selfishness, and injustice. In that case, that true faith in action will overcome corruption. Anything less is just an empty show where faith is dead. (James 2:15-17) perhaps you did not eat Philippine rice after all because the rice-buying cartels of political tycoons export most Philippine rice worth US$1.56 million dollars to Middle Eastern countries and Bangladesh. Filipino farmers still only earn about Php315, and most Filipinos pay 54 pesos (average) a kilo of rice, which is almost $1 a kilo. That is very expensive and makes huge profits for the rice importers and traders.
After the harvest, the tenant farmers pay their debts, buy medicines and other necessities, and give a share to the landowner. Not much is left. So, the tenant farmers borrow money to feed their families and buy fertilizer and pesticides for the next planting. The cycle repeats itself. The poor farmers remain poor.
“Tasting the rice grown by the suffering farmers might satisfy our physical hunger. Still, we need to hunger for justice and equality, feel compassion for the victims of social injustice and government corruption, and take social action.”
Unable to grow enough rice for its needs, the Philippines imports $1.63 billion dollar worth of rice annually, mostly from Vietnam (US$1.38B), Thailand (US$71M), Pakistan ($53M) and India (US$32M). If it is true that we are what we eat, then Filipinos are truly Asians.
The rich importers with government approval and licenses grow richer while the Filipinos grow poorer and hungrier. The dictators of the food supply bring hunger to almost 17 million Filipinos. The shameful truth is that this nation cannot feed itself. The Philippines is the second biggest rice importer in the world, and rice is the 13th most imported product in the country.
If there is ever a war over Taiwan and shipping lanes in the South China Sea and West Philippine Sea are blocked for even a month or more, the Philippines would starve without rice imports. How about Japan? Will they starve? No, because the Japanese have a phobia of hunger. They grow rice on only 1.7 million ha of rice paddies and produce 7.45 million metric tons of rice as of February 2024 statistics.
Japan has reached 99 percent self-sufficiency in rice production. Considering that 80 percent of Japan’s landmass is mountains, that is a stunning achievement for feeding a population of 124.60 million people.
With five million hectares of land nationwide, the Philippines produced about 20 million metric tons of rice in 2022 for a population lower than Japan, at 115 million Filipinos. Yet, due to exports, it is far from self-sufficiency in rice, unlike its Asian neighbors. Why is that allowed to happen? A cabal of rice traders controls and profits from the rice supply, and 115 million unknowingly and silent Filipinos suffer from super high rice prices.
Indigenous peoples are subsistence farmers; they and their families survive by consuming all they grow. If they have a surplus and they don’t own a market stall, they must sell to the local traders for a low price. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, there are 2.4 million farmers in the Philippines, and 30 percent of them are poor. That is 720,000 impoverished agriculture workers. Subsistence farmers live above the hunger margin, but when there is a climate disaster, they can fall below it as crops fail due to floods or drought.
The mining industry in the Philippines continues to expand. 38 new corporations have been registered and approved, and 103 more are in waiting. Many are expanding into ancestral lands with government approval.
The military is deployed to quell protests by the indigenous people when mining corporations move in and go digging up forests and polluting rivers. Community leaders, workers, and environmentalists are frequently harassed, threatened, and even killed, especially when indigenous leaders refuse to sign away their people’s ancestral land rights. This is likely the reason why the government has stopped awarding Ancestral Domain Titles to the indigenous people.
Let all good people stand together for social justice in action, do good and oppose evil, and with real faith, be convinced that one day we will win.
