EDITORS DESK
Rice is not just a very sensitive issue in the Philippines, but also an emotional one.
As a daughter of a rice farmer and living in a community of farmers as a child, the ricefield played an important part of my childhood.
Rice farming is backbreaking. One of the songs I learned during my elementary years from my music teacher essays the hardship of a rice farmer. The lyric goes, “Planting rice is never fun. Bent from morn till the set of sun, cannot stand and cannot sit, cannot rest for a little bit.” The lyrics may be a bit exaggerated, but it is essentially true.
From the land preparation to planting, growing, harvesting, and drying, not to mention the scorching direct heat from the sun. It’s a continuous hard labor for four months.
The most difficult part, which I don’t like to recall because it is agonizingly painful, is the “giok,” the rest are easier to remember and even fun.
During those days, once the rice stalks have been harvested, farmers have to literally grind the stalks using their bare feet to separate the palay from the stalks. It’s called “giok.” Good thing, the thresher came up saving the farmers from the grueling “giok.”
A common joke among farmers is that ghosts will spare you once you’ve already cooked and eaten the newly harvested rice.
But before a rice farmer can eat from his new harvest, he is already deep in debt for fertilizer, seeds, and payment to farm hands. A rice farmer ends up buying rice by the kilo at a store than eating his own produce. And this cycle of a sad story never ends.
But real rice farmers, like my father, would never abandon their ricefields, no matter how small that parcel may be. They love what they do, the hard labor becomes an entertainment for them year-in and year-out.
My parents disdained the thought of a store-bought rice. The notion is if you have rice in your “bandi” (a rice storage inside your house usually made of rattan or wood) that can sustain you until the next harvest, you are “okay.”
This is actually a misguided measure of one’s status in the community.
“Okay” here means you have stable staple food supply for that specific period only. “Okay” does not mean you can send your kids to college or buy viand to accompany your rice at mealtime. It is okay because you have rice. Sustenance is guaranteed and life is fine as long as you have rice on the table. Rice is everything. Rice is life.
Thus, even if it was difficult already for my father to go to the farm, he would force himself to stand on the roadside and watch the ricefield moving in a wavelike fashion as the wind hits its surface and him relishing in sheer delight, a joy that emanates from a farmer’s sense of accomplishment.
A week after my father passed on, the buying price of palay was at its highest ₱23 per kilo. He would have been so happy.
But palay prices fluctuate. As of May this year, the Philippine Statistics Authority data showed that farmgate price of palay stood at ₱19.06 from ₱18.79 in April.
The Department of Agriculture, however, said the Philippines has enough rice to meet the daily needs of Filipinos for the third quarter this year.
In a statement, the DA said there was a six percent increase in production from January to June, based on the Philippine Rice Information System.
This means palay production would thus reach 8.605 million metric tons (MT) this year, equivalent to 5.6 million MT of milled rice, higher than the 8.153 million MT in 2022.
That’s why, it baffled me to think why rice prices are rising. Imported rice should even be cheaper. The ₱20 per kilo rice narrative is baloney. As they say, tell it to the marines!
Retail prices for both imported and locally-produced rice in the Philippines rose further by between four percent to 14 percent this month as global and domestic farmgate prices soared, adding pressure on food inflation.
DA said it expects rice prices to stabilize. When?
The steady rise in prices of the country’s staple food pushed local rice inflation to 4.2 percent in July, the fastest pace since 2019, indicating growing pressure on the government to rapidly increase its stockpile.
Adding to supply risks, the Philippines is bracing for the impact on harvests of dry weather brought by the El Niño phenomenon.
If only farmers are faithfully incentivized, like giving them free or subsidized fertilizer and palay price support, proper water irrigation, it would alleviate their plight.
If only we could put an end to graft and corruption and put this huge money into our farms, life in the farm would be bearable.
It is not yet too late to make agriculture a battleground against corruption because what we need now is an agriculture agenda if we have to help our farmers and ensure food security.
(Bernie Cahiles-Magkilat is the Business Editor of Manila Bulletin)