Rice Stall in the Market. Photo: Paul Ricafrente/canva.com
The rising cost of food affects everybody, and we need to be aware that many processors and traders are adding their mark-up to the price of food coming 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$6 a day. Is that fair earnings?
The Philippine population is 115 million, and 14.2 per cent or 17 million Filipinos go hungry most days, according to a survey by the Social Weather Station (SWS) released this year. Many of the very poor just eat a handful of cooked rice and soya sauce or a piece of small fish. Others in the cities eat “pag-pag,” a stew of re-cooked scraps from the uneaten dinners of restaurant customers. The greed of the corrupt tycoons and elite that control the Philippine food supply, especially rice, and the politicians that enable it, are to blame for hunger and the super-high price of rice.
The fact is that so many Filipinos are hungry and despairing of a better life in a nation of 79,000 Filipino ($) 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 causing hunger in the Philippines.
Tasting the rice grown by the suffering farmers might satisfy our physical hunger, but we also 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 a non-government organisation working for social justice and farmers' or indigenous people’s rights.
If you are striving to be a true Christian and have faith that goodness and action for social justice will overcome greed, inequality, selfishness and injustice, then 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 to the 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 fertiliser and pesticides for the next planting. The cycle repeats itself. The poor farmers remain poor.
Unable to grow enough rice for its needs, the Philippines imports $1.63 billion worth of rice annually, mostly from Vietnam (US$1.38B), Thailand (US$71M), Pakistan (US$53M), and India (US$32M). If it is true that we are what we eat, then Filipinos are truly Asian.
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 into the Philippines.
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 per cent self-sufficiency in rice production. Considering that 80 per cent of Japan's landmass is mountains, that is a stunning achievement for feeding a population of 124.60 million people.
The Philippines, with five million hectares of land nationwide, 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 control and profit from the rice supply, and 115 million unknowing and silent Filipinos suffer super high prices for rice?
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. There are 2.4 million farmers in the Philippines and 30 percent are poor, says the Philippine Statistics Authority. 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.
Let all good people stand together for social justice in action and do good and oppose evil, and with real faith, be convinced that one day we will win.
Columban Fr Shay Cullen lives and works in the Philippines.
Related links
- Read more from the current Columban PEJ eBulletin.
