‘Perpetual fast’

“Talk does not cook rice,” The Chinese say. Presidential aspirants Francis Escudero and Loren Legarda chatter about rice. Specifically, they mutter about kickbacks from imports. They haven’t shown hard evidence—so far.

But when did this administration skip a chance to shear “big ticket” items? Never—be they broadband deals, road construction, fertilizer programs or rice importations.

Rice prices spiked in the summer of 2008, surging 36 percent over the previous three years. “This could be the end of the ‘Goldilocks era’ when food prices kept an even keel for three decades,” the BBC noted. “We’re on the cusp of a new era of volatility and rising prices.”

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo wasn’t surprised, huffed Palace spokesmen. Really? Nonetheless, she scrambled to shop abroad. In Asia, governments can collapse when rice runs short. Premium prices, then prevailing, stiffed us.

Today’s hefty import orders mean Ms Arroyo is ensuring there will be rice in 2010. That’s when computers tally our votes for the first time. But what about the day after?

But who among the presidential aspirants has really sketched out a program against hunger? Even among those with jobs, almost 14 percent suffered “involuntary hunger, at least once in three months,” Social Weather Stations reports.

Hunger is a prison camp. And malnutrition is slow-drip torture whose effects span generations.

Scrawny kids are Exhibit A. As in Togo, Africa, 28 percent of our children, under five, are underweight. In next door Thailand, it is 9 percent.

The IQs of wizened kids, borne and nursed by ill-fed mothers will be impaired. “Their remotes will always lack a button or two.” Every time dismal results of the International Mathematics and Science Tests trickle in, we’re reminded of this extortionate cost.

The chronically hungry far outnumber those held in the country’s 1,069 jails. Last we looked, there were 61,021 inmates being held by the Bureau of Jails Management and Penology. The ill-fed form about a fifth of our population

Worldwide, the United Nation says, the number of malnourished will top 1.02 billion this year. This reverses decades of declines. The global recession could add 103 million to the roster of the hungry.

Food is the most basic human need. Man has a fundamental right to adequate food. This right is the bedrock of other human freedoms. So, what we have today is a massive infraction of human rights.

Does that sound abstract? At the core of all rights are people. Most are poor. They are not “another race of creatures, bound on other journeys,” to borrow a phrase from Charles Dickens. [Rather, we all] are fellow passengers to the grave.”

Philippine Human Development Report 2009 reveals incidence of poverty varies widely—from 8.5 percent in Metro Manila to 34 percent in Cebu, 54 percent in Sorsogon and 94 percent in Sulu.

The affluent can pay for better nutrition, modern health services and schooling, not to mention the third car, summer vacations, etc. They live, on average, almost a generation longer than the poor.

Consider the varying life expectancies of our provinces. People born in La Union in 2006, for example, could hope to live 74 plus years. That’s not the case with those in Palawan where life spans are 63 years. Tawi-Tawi’s is even shorter: 53 years.

“The shortened life spans of the poor is a scandal that calls for urgent redress,” the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali wrote. “We can ignore this injustice only if we forfeit all claims to being a civilized society.”

Today’s fault lines zigzag between an affluent few blind to responsibility that wealth entrusts and an indigent minority whose human needs, stoked by rising expectations, fester unmet. Yet, justice is the insurance we take out for our skin.

The causes of hunger interlock. Many cannot afford to buy food. More than 5.6 million have only part-time jobs. Population increases are another. There are five mouths today where there was one in 1940. And if a “demographic transition” doesn’t occur, there will be six mouths by 2015.

Neglect, conflict and abuse kept Mindanao from fulfilling its potential to be the country’s breadbasket. Food for our grandchildren depend on a few inches of topsoil. And this soil is being washed into the sea by flash floods caused by deforestation. Our fishing grounds accumulate deposits of plastic and cyanide.

If food is to be on our grandchildren’s tables, cynical neglect of farmers and fishermen—symbolized by Jocelyn Bolante’s fertilizer scam—must end. No one else can produce food but these frail men and women.

The G-8 leaders at their L’Aquila summit meeting stressed this point. They called for a shift from food aid to investments in agriculture. They pledged $20 billion to help small farmers in poor nations get the seeds, irrigation and mechanisms to secure a fair price for their produce.

This new G-8 thrust is relevant to us. For political survival, the government reduced food security policy to two components: (a) availability and (b) affordability. It gave agricultural production short shrift. “Importation became a strategy equal to production, no longer just a policy tool to address food shortages.”

That has to be reversed. Joseph of the Scriptures illustrates that there is no alternative to raising food for ensuring food security. Asian farmers say, “Dependence on others brings a perpetual fast.”

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Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com

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