Women cooking the Filipino rice cake bibingka in Las Pinas, the Philippines. Rice is an essential part of every Filipino meal. - The Straits Times/ANN
MANILA, Jan 22 (The Straits Times/ANN): The Philippines is teeming with agricultural land and has a climate suitable for growing rice and yet, for decades, the tropical country has struggled to produce enough of this food staple to feed its surging population.
It is quite the irony for a nation where rice is deeply ingrained in its culture, history and cuisine. Rice is an essential part of every Filipino meal, with families serving it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Traditional snacks are made from sticky rice.
The crop is also associated with many Philippine rituals and customs. Rice grains are thrown over newly-weds as they exit the church to symbolise a shower of blessings. When Filipinos move to a new home, superstition says they must bring a bag of rice with them so they would never go hungry.
Filipinos even have separate words for different forms of rice: palay for unmilled rice, bigas for milled rice and kanin for cooked rice.
The Philippines did become self-sufficient in rice in the 1970s to 1980s, allowing the country to export a small amount of rice. This was due to the Green Revolution programme of former president Ferdinand Marcos Sr, the late strongman whose namesake and only son now leads the country.
The government had worked with the Philippines-based independent and non-profit International Rice Research Institute (Irri) to pioneer scientific research into high-yielding rice varieties and introduce new technology to boost farm production.
But things turned sour when Marcos Sr placed the country under martial law in 1972. Political tensions and a rice pest infestation in parts of the country later led to low supplies. Crops like corn, pineapple and coconut that were more profitable than rice were later prioritised for export.
Experts told The Straits Times that the Philippines failed to sustain its rice self-sufficiency in succeeding years due to its failure to modernise the industry, the government’s faulty import policies, extreme weather events and a lack of support for farmers, who remain among the country’s poorest.
Mr Nafees Meah, Irri’s South Asia representative, said the Philippines’ current rice productivity is unable to keep up with the demand from its growing 112 million population.
He added that the country has a geographic disadvantage as it is an archipelago. It does not have large, flat, alluvial plains like Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, which are among South-east Asia’s top rice exporters. Typhoons visit the Philippines multiple times a year, often flattening swathes of farmland.
Latest available data from the Philippine Statistics Authority said the country’s self-sufficiency ratio for rice was 81.5 per cent in 2021, down by 3.5 percentage points from 2020. This means it had to import 18.5 per cent of the 17.946 million tonnes of its rice supply that year.
The Philippines remains the largest rice importer in South-east Asia and is the second-largest global importer, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. In 2023, the Philippines’ Department of Agriculture is expecting to import around 2.5 million tonnes of rice, same as its annual import average.
“The curve has flattened. There hasn’t been that increase in productivity that I would have hoped to see,” said Mr Meah. “So if you’ve got an increasing population and increasing per capita consumption, and not a huge increase in productivity, then you’re going to have some shortfalls.”
Mr Jayson Cainglet, executive director of farmers’ group Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura, blamed the situation on the government’s failure to properly prepare the local agricultural sector before joining the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995.
The WTO’s trade liberalisation policies affected Filipino farmers, who must compete with rice importers selling their imports at a cheaper price. The lack of cold storage facilities and farm-to-market roads is also a perennial problem in the country.
“Why is imported rice cheaper? Because farmers who produced them overseas are being subsidised... The problem here in the Philippines is that we’re often visited by typhoons, but when farmlands are flattened, there’s no insurance for farmers from the government,” said Mr Cainglet.
The Philippine government does provide subsidies for seeds and fertilisers, and offers crop insurance for rice farmers. But distribution is usually slow, leaving farmers to fend for themselves when disaster strikes.
A June 2022 study by the World Bank also found that agricultural insurance has reached only one-third of the country’s farmers.
The Philippine government over the years has also made the mistake of importing tonnes of rice close to the harvest season. Farmers are forced to sell their crops at lower farmgate prices to traders, who then sell rice to consumers at higher prices.
Chronic smuggling of agricultural products into the Philippines has compounded the problem, hurting farmers’ incomes and reducing government revenues from uncollected taxes.
The upshot is that rice farmers’ income is low.
There are two rice harvest seasons a year in the Philippines, and farmers earn between 16,000 pesos (S$390) and 20,000 pesos per season, selling the excess rice after keeping what they need for their own consumption.
Mr Anong Manalo, a 73-year-old rice farmer from Pangasinan province in northern Philippines, said this is barely enough to feed a family of five, so some farmers also raise chickens, hogs or cattle to supplement their income. Others take on odd jobs like construction work in between harvest seasons.
Even so, rice farmers on average earn a daily minimum wage of only 400 pesos.
In 2019, to increase the competitiveness of local farmers, then President Rodrigo Duterte signed a law that replaced quantitative restrictions on rice imports with tariffs. It also required the government to set up an annual rice competitiveness enhancement fund, which finances efforts to modernise the agriculture sector and assist farmers.
But critics said the law has so far failed to lower the price of rice and has only made things worse for farmers.
“We’re getting demoralised because the government can’t seem to find a solution to farmers’ woes apart from importation. They will promise to give us seeds and fertilisers, but not all farmers get the assistance. So where do they go? That’s the big question,” Mr Manalo said.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine further worsened the situation by increasing the price of natural gas, a key ingredient for the urea fertiliser that Filipino farmers use.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who made a campaign promise to lower the price of rice to just 20 pesos per kilogram, from 35 to 48 pesos now, during his six-year term, said it is crucial for the country to adopt supportive policies to modernise the rice sector.
In November 2022, Mr Marcos visited Irri’s headquarters in Laguna province for a briefing on various initiatives being carried out to improve crop resilience in the country. As concurrent agriculture secretary, Mr Marcos is an ex-officio member of Irri’s board.
Irri continues to research more efficient rice production technologies and new high-yielding rice varieties that are more resistant to pests and diseases. In 2014, it worked with the government to create the Philippine Rice Information System, South-east Asia’s first satellite-based rice monitoring system.
But these scientific advancements in rice production can only go so far in a country that continues to face one agricultural crisis after another. Mr Meah of Irri said a “whole ecosystem of policies and interventions” must be in place for changes on the field to happen.
The pressure is on Mr Marcos, who has to ensure his promised agricultural reforms trickle down to farmers. “It is up to us now in the Philippine government to make sure those technologies, those products in rice production go down to the grassroots,” he said. - The Straits Times/ANN
