RP's rice and fall

DIE HARD III
Herman Tiu Laurel
4/15/2011



Since the 1986 Yellow takeover of Philippine government, the country has nosedived economically. The US and IMF-WB-backed Cory Aquino economic team’s promised progress and democracy never came. Ushering in economic dynamism with competition, the elimination of corruption, as well as “foreign investments” were merely used as pretexts for the ruling Yellows to impose globalization, through the triad of liberalization, deregulation and privatization.

Twenty-five years later, after privatizing the central bank by decoupling its accountability from public control through constitutional and statutory redefinitions; after emasculating tariff with import liberalization; after privatizing major state industries in power, water and lucrative infrastructures such as tollways and ports; and after the many extractions of “foreign investors,” the country has been pauperized.

Today, amid increasing domestic hunger and global food supply and price crises, these Yellows are into privatizing the National Food Authority (NFA) and the country’s rice trading, thus, ensuring the explosion of hunger and the final collapse of the nation’s food sustainability.

Each and every privatization of economically as well as socially beneficial, not to mention strategic and basic, state enterprise was preceded by massive disinformation and black propaganda — obviously to discredit, vilify, and even demonize the prized target.

Yellow economic managers and controlled mainstream media, including captured learning institutions such as the UP and Ateneo schools of economics, joined in maligning these state enterprises — whether in power, water, and other services — as either corrupt, inefficient, or budget-guzzling white elephants.

When that did not suffice, successive Yellow presidents appointed their loyal lieutenants as heads of these companies to ensure that these state enterprises indeed became even more corrupted, inefficient, and budget-guzzling — and sabotaged deliberately, the way Cory Aquino appointed power oligarch Ernesto Aboitiz to the National Power Corp. (Napocor), old Tarlac politico Aping Yap to the MWSS, and terrorist bomber Ed Olaguer to the PNCC.

Today, the final privatization is going into high gear, led by the Malacañang team so endeared to the Americans that its ambassador went to congratulate the then president-elect in 2010 to preempt the official congressional proclamation lest some evidence crop up in the aftermath of Hocus-PCOS. That was essential to ensure that the global neo-conservative agenda of systematic re-domination and mass genocide of clueless and unresisting Third World countries proceeded unhampered.

With the “success” of privatization of virtually all essential public services now used to squeeze every ounce of wealth from each Filipino, the globalists are now ready to privatize the last remaining ones to squeeze him of the very staple that gives this nation life — rice. With it, the globalists are going to wield the power of death over our nation.

This was done systematically in the years leading to Edsa I, even as the late Bong Tangco, then President Ferdinand Marcos’ Agriculture secretary, tried to preserve the gains from Masagana 99, a timeline of which the NFA Employees’ Association provides us:

• 1980: WB Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) $200-million loan — phase out of price control and subsidy for farm inputs including fertilizer;
• 1983: Increase of loan to $300 million — on condition that the private sector is allowed to export rice, as price controls for rice and corn are dismantled;
• 1985: US PL-480 conditionalities — liberalize fertilizer imports (which led to the death of PhilPhos), privatize wheat/flour imports and non-grain trading, thus reducing NFA revenues;
• 1986: Dismantling of government-supported monopolies in international trading of rice, corn, wheat;
• 1993: ADB loan agreement leading to complete subsidy withdrawal in 1998;
• 1998: USAID-AGILE study on privatization of NFA;
• 1999: Required privatization of rice importation, etc. in exchange for ADB’s $175-million loan grant;
• 2001: Incorporation of AGILE plan to dismantle NFA under Arroyo’s Medium Term Development Plan;
• 2010: Proposed zero budget for NFA under PeNoy as the WB recommends the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program instead of rice rationing so that the US a la PL-480 and transnational corporations can control rice trade and sell their surplus rice to the poor.

In contrast, Marcos had the CorFarm that required large companies like Meralco (Manila Electric Co.) and San Miguel Corp. to engage in rice production to supply one sack of monthly rice allowance to its tens of thousands of employees.

Despite pressures from the US, WB and ADB, Philippine rice production was sufficient throughout the 70s and 80s until the effects were heightened by the FVR-Sebastian policy of giving low priority to rice and high priority to such “high value” crops as black pepper, leading to the rice “pila” and deficit in 1998 that quickly recovered under Estrada from 1999 to 2000, until it crashed again into deficit a year after Edsa II, in 2002, and remained that way ever since.

Nothing good has and will come out of the acquiescence of the Philippine government to the demands of the multilateral financial agencies and the US Agriculture Department to completely privatize our government’s rice agency and its related functions. That will be the nation’s fall.

The only good thing, in a black humor sort of way, is the potential for mass uprising and revolution that a desperately starving people may resort to. But that will require a leadership that is ideologically and organizationally developed to lead to the correct path. A Tunisian or Egyptian “people power” will not do; only a Venezuelan Hugo Chavez-type revolt, organized with an alliance of nationalist-populist mass organizations like the ones we have here that are led by nationalist military idealists, will pave RP’s rise.

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