Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno, who once famously told consumers suffering from high prices to be “less of a crybaby,” has now weighed in on agricultural policy, suggesting that farmers stop planting rice and shift to more high-value crops.
Observing that agriculture contributed less than 1 percent to the growth in gross domestic product in 2018, the Budget chief said the economic picture would improve if farmers shifted to high-value crops and the country relied on cheaper rice imports.
“A growth of maybe 3-4 percent is possible for the sector if we focus on high-value crops and just import rice,” Diokno said last week. “That is the most efficient economic arrangement. And as I said, you always have to think of what’s the greatest good for the farmers.”
In his rush to burnish his economic numbers, however, the secretary fails to mention how critical rice is in the Filipino diet, and how foolish it would be to rely on the kindness of strangers for the long-term supply of this staple.
It may indeed be cheaper today to import rice but the largest exporters of rice in the region today—India, Thailand, Vietnam and China—are also among the biggest consumers of the grain. It would be reasonable to assume that in a lean crop year, they would cut back on exports to feed their own people or raise the price of their commodity, two possibilities that would spell trouble for a rice-consuming nation that didn't have its own production and merely depended on imports.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol sums up this argument well.
“It is as certain as the sun will rise tomorrow that 10 years from now, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Pakistan and India will no longer be able to export the same volume of rice that they ship out today. They have to feed their growing population as well,” he said. “The policy to just rely on imported rice and ask our rice farmers to diversify to other crops is a death trap. It is a shortsighted view which will kill the rice industry and drive away farmers from the rice fields.”
President Rodrigo Duterte's 10-point economic agenda calls for, among other things, increasing agricultural and rural enterprise productivity.
Instead of writing off rice farmers as being uncompetitive or asking them to shift to more lucrative crops, the government should be finding ways to make them more competitive, by making sure they have adequate financing, protection from natural disasters, access to a distribution system that does not take unfair advantage of them, and new technology that can boost productivity and protect their crops.
Data from the Southeast Asian Regional Center and the International Rice Research Institute show that in 2010, among five large Asian rice-producing nations, the Philippines devoted only 4.53 million hectares (ha) to rice production, a far cry from 44 million ha in India, 29.49 million ha in China, 12.31 million ha in Indonesia, 10.25 million ha in Thailand and 7.41 million ha in Vietnam. Yet the Philippines fed the most number of persons per hectare or rice area harvested.
President Duterte has already pinpointed the problem: arable lands have been taken by the rich to grow cash crops—much as his Budget secretary is urging the remaining rice farmers to do.
The President knows, too, that food security requires us to aim for self-sufficiency, regardless of the short-term gains that importing rice might bring.