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On World Food(less) Day

The following is Bayan Muna's unedited privilege speech delivered at the House of Representatives, First Regular Session, 12th Congress, Oct. 16, on the occasion of World Food Day.

BY REP. SATUR OCAMPO (Party-List, Bayan Muna)
Bulatlat.com

Mr. Speaker and distinguished colleagues,

I rise to speak on an urgent issue of personal and collective privilege. Today is World Food Day 2001. Amidst mounting crises, I fear hunger and poverty in the country will only get worse. Neoliberal globalization’s fairy-tale “free markets” and illusions of universal harmony are exposed by the day. Yet the government’s policies remain essentially the same.

The world is sinking into a “globalization”-induced recession, its worst in about 20 years. Let us not be deceived by the bare macroeconomic figures. The truth is, the Philippines is paying the price for being an over-eager “globalizer.” The economy, especially our agriculture, is serving the people’s interests less and less and the lot of the majority is getting worse.

The government’s all-out support to the United States attack on the people of Afghanistan starting last week is a folly we loudly decry because, among other reasons, it makes our country more vulnerable to retaliatory attack. Here again is proof that in the world order, the powerful do as they please to further their interests. Our national interest lies in doing the utmost to reduce our vulnerability to any sort of economic and military aggression.

Instead we are increasingly becoming dependent on outside sources of food. This is a vulnerability of the highest order. We must realize, before it is too late, that food can be used as leverage against us.

We are in a difficult and hostile era. If there is anything we should be reminded today, World Food Day, it’s that genuine food security and self-sufficiency is vital. And if there is anything that we must do, it’s to reject every policy that makes the people hungrier, poorer, more exploited and more dependent.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) will have its 4th Ministerial Meeting in less than a month. Among the matters to be taken up is the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and further agricultural liberalization. So far, what liberalization has done is to devastate Philippine agriculture. Unfortunately it seems that the country’s negotiating team will be negotiating for more of the same. That must not be the case.

Foodless everyday

We need to produce enough food for the people’s needs and, more, enable them to secure what they need. These do not exhaust what is needed for true development. And yet the country fails even on just these two counts. The agricultural sector neither produces enough nor ensures the well-being of the vast numbers who live in the countryside.

Domestic agricultural production is grossly distorted. It has become more so in these six years of the country’s membership in the WTO and signing up to the AoA. True, there was agricultural liberalization even before this; but the globalization hype surrounding the WTO, to which the government blindly succumbed, gave the effort added impetus.

More and more tracts of land are being devoted to bananas, mangoes and pineapple for export. From 1995 to 1999, the area planted to these fruits increased 17% and we exported 6.3 million tons of them. Yet at the same time, imports of basic food items including rice, our staple food, increased: we imported 5.1 million metric tons of rice and 1.7 million metric tons of corn. So far this year, some 650,000 metric tons of rice have already been brought in.

Indeed, the increase in all our major food imports in 1995-99 from 1990-94 is astounding. Between the two five-year periods, rice imports increased by 540%, corn by 320%, poultry by 580%, beef by 230%, pork by 120% and fish by 45%. The distorted production pattern showed up in our agricultural trade balances: the US$ 1.3 billion surplus in 1990-94 turned into a US$ 3.5 billion deficit in 1995-99.

All this is bizarre considering that we have more than enough agricultural land for the food needs of our growing population. But that isn’t even the whole picture.

Since 1994, over a million agricultural jobs have been lost and 690,000 more rural families thrown into poverty. By 2000, there were 3.7 million poor families in the countryside. Nationwide, the number of families living below the food threshold continues to rise and reached 2.6 million families last year. If each family has six members, this means some 15.6 million Filipinos slowly dying of hunger and malnutrition, with the women and children worst off.

So much for the “free market.” This is what happens when a country’s food system produces what is profitable to the producer rather than what is needed by the people. Because long-term food security is not immediately profitable, it is given up. Because the poor and hungry don’t have the economic clout to make their needs felt in the marketplace, they are ignored.

This is social injustice on a massive scale. Clearly, something is very wrong.

Agriculture for the people

What needs to be done? First is to get our bearings: domestic agriculture must serve the interests of the people not of the landlords or traders or of transnational corporate agri-business. Everything must be done to promote, protect, defend and develop our agriculture.

Paramount is genuine agrarian reform that unleashes peasant productivity. The land must be given to its tiller. There must also be substantial domestic support and judicious protection to our food producers. They must be given the means and the opportunity to be productive.

For all the trumpeted quantitative achievements of previous programs on land reform, all have come up far short of what should be done. There hasn’t been any radical restructuring of production and of markets. The reason for this failure is simple: the monopoly of the countryside elite over the structures of rural economic and political power hasn’t been dismantled.

In semifeudal and semicolonial Philippines, the greatest impact on the greatest number will come from genuine agrarian reform. The benefits from the great leap in agricultural productivity can be many: food self-sufficiency and security, resources for further agricultural and industrial development, a vast market.

Yet this kind of true agricultural development is precluded by the specious charms of agricultural liberalization and so-called modernization. What, in truth, have these wrought?

Twenty years of failure and counting

Economic growth rates have fallen drastically. The period 1981-2000 was the heyday of agricultural liberalization. Trade barriers, supposedly distorted subsidies and other domestic support were progressively taken away. If we believe government propaganda, its latter years were also of increasing “modernization.”

But the average annual growth of agriculture in the last twenty years was just 1.5%, far below the 4.2% of the twenty years before it. The share of agriculture, fisheries and forestry fell from 25.0% of Gross National Product (GNP) in 1981 to only 18.8% in 2000. Agriculture has been devastated by competition from cheap imports, government neglect, and land and crop conversion.

Post-liberalization rates couldn’t even keep pace with population growth and agricultural and crops production per capita today is lower than at the end of the 1970s. In just the past decade, between 1990-94 and 1995-99, domestic production per capita of rice fell 2.2%, of corn by 17.3%, and of fish by 14.5%.

The peasantry and fisherfolk have had it worst. We’ve already noted how the number of poor was increasing. In the countryside, this was due to soaring expenses, falling earnings, collapsing markets and the loss or uncertainty of jobs.

If anything, this experience should tell us this: we must throw away the illusion that the “free market” will result in food security and self-sufficiency. It will not and it cannot. The “free market” is just another means for those who dominate it to profit at the expense of the weak. The WTO’s AoA or Agreement on Agriculture is a vivid case in point.

Agreeing to destroy neocolonial agriculture

From the beginning, the US and the European Union (EU) only had one agenda in the AoA: to promote their big corporate agri-business interests. They sought to profit from the dumping of food surpluses and agricultural inputs on the neocolonies. Of this there can be no doubt.

Consider how the AoA, for all its high-sounding rhetoric, has been put into practice.

Implementation is grossly imbalanced and unfair. American, European and Japanese agricultural tariffs remain among the highest in the world. And even where they reduced tariffs, they built up non-tariff barriers and systems of domestic farm subsidies that are the most extensive and complex the world has ever seen. Just to subvert the AoA.

As a result, agricultural support of the members of the rich-country club Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) even increased since the AoA took effect: from US$182 billion in 1995 to US$362 billion in 1998. By themselves, the US, EU and Japan already account for some 80% of the world’s total domestic support.

These are countries that are already agricultural powerhouses, having developed through decades of protection and massive government support.

Which makes it all the more perplexing why over-eager globalizers like the Philippines do not seem to get the point that agriculture is important and must be defended until it too has become strong. Indeed, one wonders why the Philippines even entered into an agreement that bars it from using the very policies used in earnest by the agricultural superpowers themselves.

The Philippines and the rest of the world’s maldeveloped countries are paying the price for that folly. We are increasingly dependent on the developed countries for our food needs. The OECD itself, in its Agricultural Outlook 2001-2006, projects that Third World trade deficits in cereals, meats and dairy products will continue to worsen. The other side of this is of course that the rich countries’ trade surpluses will increase.

Also, five years after the World Food Summit in 1996 and six years into the AoA, the number of people worldwide who don’t get enough to eat has even increased. By the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) count, it increased from some 800 million in 1996 to about 826 million this year.

Moving forward

All of these, then, are the dimensions of the crisis of Philippine agriculture. Falling food production. Widespread rural poverty. Entrenched rural elites. Reckless liberalization.

The challenge is upon us: to create a strong domestic economy that serves the interest of the people. At the Philippines’ current stage of development, the priority is for strong domestic agriculture that can unleash peasant productivity. With our population of some 78 million and growing, this especially means agriculture that can provide for our food needs.

We cannot simply accept that agricultural backwardness is our lot. As for the WTO and the AoA, it is not a time to beg for concessions. It is not a time to plead for so-called safeguards, anti-dumping duties and competitiveness enhancement measures while liberalization proceeds apace. These will not resolve the problems of agricultural backwardness and rural poverty.

Much less is this a time for defeatism. Rather, it is a time to struggle for our country and, more, for our people.

The Agreement on Agriculture is not in the Philippines’ interests. On the contrary, our agricultural progress lies in using the full range of agricultural policy instruments including land reform and the protectionist measures of tariffs, import controls, price support and export subsidies as well as production, infrastructure, extension, credit, price and marketing support.

We do not need to ask the permission of foreigners to use these. Which is why our party, BAYAN MUNA, has filed House Resolution 234 calling for Philippine agriculture to be taken out of the WTO to enable the country to undertake the full range of policy measures needed to attain food security and defend peasant livelihoods. This is a most urgent matter for the WTO meeting is fast approaching. It is a call shared by La Via Campesina, an international movement of farmers and peasant groups, and other NGOs and multisectoral organizations worldwide.

The BAYAN MUNA representation has also filed House Resolution 235 decrying the devastation of the national economy by the government’s implementation of globalization policies and House Resolution 236 which states that the government’s implementation of so-called globalization policies has not benefited the people. Both resolutions likewise call for appropriate remedial laws and measures.

We also oppose the increasingly reckless liberalization of our backward rice production. In the works are bills that aim to replace quantitative restrictions on rice with tariffs as early as 2002 and with finality by 2005. Deceitfully, to ease their passage, this rice liberalization is adorned with “safety nets” and “competitiveness enhancement measures” for rice farmers. However, without the radical prerequisites we mentioned earlier these will be for naught. Local rice production and rice farmers’ livelihoods will just be devastated.

There must also be a stop to misguided privatization of the National Food Authority and deregulation of rice importations. Let us not cripple our farmers and our agriculture further if the real need is for government and all public institutions to genuinely serve the people.

The problem is not the lack of solutions. The problem is taking the word, treaties, agreements, policies and programs of foreign interests as divine law. It is the fear of confronting the world’s political and economic elite, of being labeled outcasts of their would-be “international community,” and fear of their supposed sanctions. It is playing the lackey to such as US imperialism, be it in the economic agreements it pushes or the wars it wages. This self-fulfilling subservience must end.

Every day is a potential turning point for the country. Wherein lies our strength? It is in our agriculture and fisheries resources. Sans appropriate support and protection the country’s vast peasantry and fisherfolk have the greatest stake in resolving the crisis of agricultural backwardness. Right now many of them are at the gates of the Batasan and some are in this hall. They are here to call attention to their plight highlighted in the observance of Peasant Month.

Our peasants and fisherfolk are organizing and struggling for their futures and for the nation’s future. If we are to be true Representatives of the Filipino people we must join them in this struggle. One thing is certain: change is long overdue.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Bulatlat.com

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