Touting the government’s “Rice for All” program to reduce rice prices as a huge success on Dec. 28, 2024 is a bad joke and it comes on Holy Innocents’ Day when tradition holds that King Herod of Judaea ordered the slaughter of all baby boys aged two and younger. In Bethlehem, prophecy holds that the “King of Israel” would be born.
What the Marcos Jr. administration killed on this day is the truth, the unburnished truth that rice prices are not going down in the markets simply because the state killed the most effective agency to influence prices—the National Food Authority (NFA), which is now reduced to stashing a “buffer” stock when traders keep bulk of the national rice inventory in warehouses, to be released drip-by-drip so as not to soak the market, keep prices high and guarantee their huge profits.
Geniuses at the Senate like Sen. Cynthia Villar lawyered for the demented Rice Tariffication Law (RTL), which privatized rice importations, barred the government from influencing prices tossed to the private sector the task of guaranteeing food security, and threw farmers down the economic quicksand. They raged against the opposition of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), thinking and using whatever is left of their pointy heads that the market is always right and that the law of supply and demand is cast in stone.
They forgot the wisdom of George Soros, who argued that the market is always wrong and proved that when he intervened in the financial markets, he bet against the British pound, and drove London crazy. Soros said players meddle with the market daily and they work much better than the “unseen hand” that stabilizes the market. In the case of the rice market, hoarders can keep their inventory for as long as six months without the staple losing its eating quality. By dispersing their stocks, they can schedule when their rice should be released, to hell with market forces. By finger-pointing alone, senators cannot solve the problem. They are the problem as well.
When rice prices skyrocketed even as imports flooded the market, Villar and company blamed others, not themselves, for pushing RTL, which also scammed farmers since they never got any decent share of the so-called RCEF cash, their share of the tariffs, which is supposed to be P15 billion a year. In their twisted logic, RTL would fund the development of the rice industry by drowning Filipino farmers with imported rice. They do not know their math. And never realized that so-called safety nets for farmers when the country acceded to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that preceded the World Trade Organization (WTO) was an unparalleled scam.
So now we are back to the same illusion of promising rice prices to dip between P3 and P5 per kilo, thinking that the people at large have forgotten that then concurrent Agriculture Secretary Ferdinand Marcos Jr. promised to reduce rice prices to P20 per kilo. KMP and the National Federation of Peasant Women (AMIHAN) tagged the promise as an illusion that got slammed by reality. More than two years after making the promise, P20 per kilo chatter became a mere “aspiration,” like the mere aspiration for a national budget that sustains the people’s needs as required by the 1986 Constitution. Marcos Jr. simply cannot address the roots of chronic high rice prices that were worsened by the irrational addiction to food imports.
The P5-billion “Rice-for-All” initiative, implemented under the Kadiwa ng Pangulo program, has been trumpeted as a huge success no matter how small is its reach along with its limited volume. KMP and Amihan argued that the program merely masks deeper issues like rice supply instability, import dependency, and the criminal neglect of local rice farmers. Selling a few hundred sacks of imported rice that may soon rot is hardly a solution to high prices. For rural households and farmers, whose incomes remain stagnant, the minimal price reduction is of no moment, they stressed.
KMP and Amihan urged the government to support the farming sector by doing the following: Enact genuine agrarian reform to ensure land ownership and productivity for farmers; halt large-scale importation that depresses local market prices; increase budget allocation for production subsidies to support local farmers, and; provide price guarantees for farmers to ensure they get higher palay farmgate prices. Failing to satisfy this bucket list, KMP and Amihan said there is no way for the Department of Agriculture (DA), the National Irrigation Administration (NIA), and other agencies to reduce rice prices, not even the P29 per kilo that the favored chief of the NIA was supposed to achieve.
