A group of farmers asserted that the government’s bio-ethanol program will not ease poverty and hunger in the countryside but will exacerbate instead the Filipino people’s food insecurity.
BY KARL G. OMBION
REGIONS
Bulatlat
A group of farmers asserted that the government’s bio-ethanol program will not ease poverty and hunger in the countryside but will exacerbate instead the Filipino people’s food insecurity.
Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas Secretary General Danilo Ramos said that bio-ethanol is an alternative fuel and not a food program. “As such, it is detrimental to the food security of the country and a further threat to the farmers’ security of tenure and to the agrarian reform beneficiaries.”
Ramos, who led the national fact finding mission on Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) implementation in Negros, said that bio-ethanol is being promoted by the agribusiness and chemical transnational corporations in the face of sharpening competition among oil companies worldwide.
“In essence, they are just looking for new ways to keep their monopoly control over the global market and over local resources to keep their superprofits. They are not concerned with the food security and agricultural sovereignty of nations, especially the poor ones,” Ramos said.
“When this program goes full swing, more productive agricultural lands will be converted to non-food production, and in effect, deprive our farmers and small agricultural producers of viable lands for the production of our basic needs especially rice, corn, vegetables, poultry and livestock,” he stressed.
Ramos cited the case of the Philippine-China Agricultural Agreement which President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo already signed. The agreement, Ramos stressed, will allow the Chinese government to use one million hectares of RP lands for the production of their hybrid rice, corn and sorghum. Five provinces have already been marked as pilot areas, namely Bulacan, Pampanga, Bataan, Nueva Ecija and Pangasinan.
When the bio-ethanol program goes into full swing in Negros, the same problems of land re-concentration and repression will be confronted by farmers and agrarian reform beneficiares. This will also aggravate further the region’s food instability and dependence on imported goods, Ramos added.
He said “This move is crazy because it will deprive our farmers and agricultural producers of vast lands for our local production.”
He also said that if more lands are allotted for bio-ethanol and other hybrid crops for export, the Philippines will end up with no land for its own food security program. (Bulatlat.com)
