By Leonardo Micua

 

PANGASINAN and Dagupan City may have been spared by the wrath of Typhoon “Karding”, but our neighboring provinces in Central Luzon up to Calabarzon were not.

An example is Nueva Ecija, the undisputed rice granary of the Philippines and today’s largest rice producer in PH, with Isabela just in second place and Pangasinan, third.

A report said more than P31 billion worth of agriculture, mostly palay, were destroyed by combined torrential rains and gusty winds unleashed by Typhoon “Karding”.

Nueva Ecija’s huge losses in palay is a big headache to the whole nation. It means the government must import more rice from either China, Vietnam and Indonesia beginning the fourth quarter of this year to save the Filipinos from hunger and starvation as rice is the staple of the Filipinos.

But do you know that there’s now a Myanmar rice being sold in our markets today? This means that despite being ruled by a military junta, Myanmar was able to step up its rice production and had overtaken us in producing the staple. Aside from that, they are now  exporting their excess to other countries, including PH.

It’s perhaps only the Philippines now that is still dependent on imported rice to feed its population that has grown almost 120 million. It’s unthinkable that even if the Philippines is the home of the International Rice Research Institute located in Los Banos, Laguna where rice technicians from all over the world train so that they can help their respective countries sustain rice sufficiency.

It is incongruous, indeed, that we now lag far behind our neighbors in Asia in rice production, when we were ahead in this endeavor more than 60 years ago.

We know we have a myriad of problems in the farms that need to be addressed first before we can think of exporting rice to other Asian nations again like we did during the Martial Law era under then President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos.

Do we see a Masagana 99 version to whip up our rice production considering our need to feed a burgeoning population of nearly 120 million? Can another Marcos bring us closer to our dream to being a rice-exporting country?

That is easier said than done and even our technocrats who studied abroad have no quick and long terms solutions to our ills.

I personally doubt this can be done because President BBM, for one, has not given up the agriculture portfolio to somebody he trusts who could render full time and pilot the country to ensure food security.

With the dollar-peso exchange rate soaring to almost P60 to one American green buck, and still counting, costs of imported rice plus tariff, would naturally go sky high. From where I sit, I can see a spiraling of price of rice soon as a result of the wholesale devastation of crops in Nueva Ecija and Central Luzon.

We also need to help our farmers because most of them seemed to have already lost their steam to keep cultivating their lands again since they are also spending more in producing a kilo of rice and in selling the same in the market.

Now back to Typhoon “Karding”. There may be a need for our legislators to revisit the Philippine Crop Insurance Program to make it more attractive and beneficial to the farmers.

With crop insurance in full effect, they no longer need to feel helpless every time an  adverse weather condition hits because they know they can still recover from their crop insurance coverage.

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