THE rising cost of food affects everybody, and we need to be aware that there are many processors and traders adding their markup to the price of food 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. If we eat Philippine rice, then it was likely grown by some of the 2.4 million poor Filipino rice farmers who earned an average of P285 to P331 — or nearly $5 to $6 as of Saturday morning — a day growing and harvesting the crop. Is that earning fair?

A Social Weather Stations survey showed earlier this year that 14.2 percent of Filipino families experienced involuntary hunger in the first three months of 2024. Many of the very poor just eat a handful of cooked rice and soy sauce or a piece of small fish. Others in the cities consume “pagpag,” a stew of recooked scraps from the uneaten dinners of restaurant customers. The apparent greed of the tycoons who control the Philippines’ food supply, especially rice, and the politicians who enable them, are to blame for the hunger and super-high rice prices.

Hunger can fuel revolutions, like what happened in Bangladesh last week. The 15-year autocratic rule of Sheikh Hasina — and the South Asian country’s elite — was overthrown after violent street demonstrations saw hundreds of protesters killed by government forces, forcing the prime minister to resign and flee to India. Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, was invited by the student leaders who organized the protests to lead the country’s interim government.

The fact that so many Filipinos are hungry and living in despair in a nation with scores of millionaires and billionaires who don’t seem inclined to share their wealth to help alleviate poverty and hunger in the country. This indicates the level of great inequality that is increasing hunger in the Philippines.

Tasting the rice grown by our suffering farmers might satisfy our physical hunger, but we need to hunger for justice and equality. We also need to feel compassion for victims of social injustice and government corruption and take action. We can join a movement or a nongovernment organization involved in social justice, 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 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-grown rice after all because the rice-buying cartels of tycoons export most of them — said to be worth $1.56 million — to Middle Eastern countries, as well as to Bangladesh. Filipino farmers still only earn about P315 and most Filipinos pay P54 — almost $1 — on average for a kilo of rice. That is very expensive for us but very profitable for rice importers and traders.

After their harvest, tenant-farmers pay for debts, medicines and others, and give the landowners their share. Not much is left after this. So the tenant-farmers borrow money to feed their families and buy fertilizers and pesticides for the next planting season. The cycle repeats itself, and these farmers remain poor.

Unable to grow enough rice for its own consumption, the Philippines reportedly imports more than $1.5 billion worth of rice annually, mostly from Vietnam ($1.38 billion), Thailand ($71 million), Pakistan ($53 million) and India ($32 million). If it is true that we are what we eat, then Filipinos are truly Asians.

As rice importers with government approvals and licenses grow richer, ordinary Filipinos grow poorer and hungrier. The dictators of the food supply bring hunger to almost 17 million. 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 country’s 13th most imported product.

If ever war erupts over Taiwan and shipping lanes in the South China Sea are blocked for even a month, the Philippines would starve without imported rice. How about Japan; would they starve? No, because the Japanese have a phobia of hunger. They grow rice on only 1.7 million hectares of rice paddies and produce 7.45 million metric tons of the staple, statistics as of February 2024 show. Japan has reached 99 percent in rice self-sufficiency. Considering that 80 percent of Japan’s land mass are actually mountains, feeding 124.60 million Japanese is a stunning achievement.

Compare that with the Philippines, which had 5 million hectares devoted to growing about 20 million metric tons of rice for around 115 million Filipinos in 2022, yet still far from being self-sufficient in the staple, unlike its Asian neighbors. Why was this allowed to happen? A cabal of rice traders control and profit from the supply, and around 115 million unknowing and silent Filipinos suffer from super-high rice prices.

Indigenous peoples are subsistence farmers; they and their families survive by consuming what they grow. If they have a surplus and don’t own a market stall, they must sell to local traders for a low price. There are 2.4 million farmers in the Philippines, and 30 percent are poor, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. That is 720,000 impoverished agricultural workers. Subsistence farmers live above the hunger margin, but when there is a climate disaster, they can fall further below it as floods or droughts ruin crops.

Unabated mining corporations continue to expand. Thirty-eight new corporations have been registered and approved, and 103 more are still waiting. Many are expanding into ancestral lands with government approval. Military personnel are deployed to quell protests by Indigenous peoples when mining corporations move in and go digging up forests and polluting rivers. Community leaders and workers, and environmentalists are frequently harassed and threatened — and some are even killed — especially when Indigenous leaders refuse to sign away their people’s ancestral land rights. This is likely the reason the government has stopped awarding ancestral domain titles to them.

Let all good people stand together for social justice in action, do good and oppose evil, and, with real faith, be convinced that one day we will win.

Published Date: August 11, 2024