GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc, The Philippine Star, Friday, April 25, 2008
It’s the same every year as Labor Day approaches. Malacañang brags of having kept food and fuel prices down, so there’s no need to hike wages. But this time they’re singing a different tune. During a factory visit last week Gloria Arroyo declared a 10-percent raise in the government starting July, and hoped minimum pay in private firms will expand too. Congress allies then warned the regional wage boards to issue higher salary rates by mid-May, or else face abolition.
The admin obviously has lost to inflation, although it’s not admitting so. The Palace is pointing to a slew of “outside forces beyond our control” that suddenly kicked up gas and rice prices: OPEC cartelism and oil speculation, increased demand for cereals and meat in
With everyone else to blame except the admin, Malacañang then set out to show how it heroically was doing everything to aid the poor. Everyday it did something new, to shock and awe. First, it pulled cheap government-milled rice out of public marts, supposedly due to mislabeling as pricier varieties. Then it began selling the rice thru truck stores, churches, in slums, and soon in schools. Import deals were rushed with
As usual it was all for photo-ops. Malacañang was also only looking for scapegoats.
Why vendors would mix expensive rice with inexpensive but smelly government stocks is incredible, to begin with. Consumers buy from their suki, who wouldn’t dare pull a fast one and forever lose their business, since mixed rice ends up gooey from longer cooking time. If government rice is disappearing from market stalls, it’s because there isn’t much to begin with. The NFA can buy up only one percent of palay harvests; hence, only one-half percent of rice.
Selling through churches was meant to mask the true causes of rising prices, astute bishops soon found out. Winding queues under the hot sun for a measly ration of three kilos from the rice trucks only demeaned the poor all the more. The social welfare secretary had to warn slum dwellers not to fall prey to politicking in the issuance of ration coupons.
Panic buying from
Yawns met the boast of helping farmers via higher palay prices — precisely because the cash-strapped NFA buys inconsequentially little. There were no takers to NFA’s opening of rice importation by private traders.
Raiding warehouse was most ominous. The justice secretary and his NBI chief called the Chinese-Filipino owners rapacious hoarders. Their proof: high inventories by the thousands of sacks, and receipts of palay purchases higher than NFA rates, which all allegedly meant the Chinamen were scheming to sell high.
Phooey! In the rice trade, stocking up thousands of sacks only means good capitalization — not hoarding. The trader will have to sell sooner or later, lest his stocks rot. Buying palay high is never a crime; in fact, it helps the farmers. An intent to sell high, assuming the raided traders were so thinking, is not a crime either. It’s like wishing dead the reckless cabbie that just cut into your lane, which is very far from actually killing him.
The raids also backfired. Other traders stopped buying palay, lest they too be mechanically accused of hoarding. Farmers ended up losers.
But the admin’s true intention was accomplished. It laid the blame of rising prices and shortage of cheap rice on the Chinese among us. This will come in handy in case the crisis worsens as some forecast. Like in
Niftily forgotten through all this are the real reasons for the shortage: official incompetence and corruption. For seven years now RP has been short of two million tons of rice per year. The admin response has been to import the deficiency instead of improving yields — basically because kickbacks from imports come quicker in two months, compared to a year from irrigation works and none from hybrid research. Forgotten too was the waste of P780 million by Malacañang favorite Jocjoc Bolante on ghost fertilizer deliveries as Arroyo was preparing to run for President in 2004. About that same time, the Quedancor under the Office of the President also filched P1.7 billion from farcical hog dispersal.
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