With the recent rice shortage affecting the Philippines today, there are calls from certain sectors to stop the implementation of the Philippine Biofuels Law that was signed into law on January 12, 2007.
The rice shortage in the Philippines is caused by the announcement of Thailand and Vietnam that they are putting a cap on their exports in order to meet local demand. The high demand caused by increasing demand from China and India also helped further in creating a shortage in food. [source]
Quite sad really, considering that in the 60’s and 70’s, the Philippines was an exporter of rice. The International Rice Research Institute is even based in the Philippines, in Los Banos. Now after a few decades we have degraded to a rice importing country. A lot of fingers are pointed to government’s failure to support the farmer as the main culprit for the decay in production. Lack of farm to market roads and post harvest technology to increase yields as well as the all too important credit line.
Because of the rice shortage basic economics takes into effect. When demand far out strips supply then prices increase. Greed also sets in when unscrupulous vendors hoard and smuggle in rice to take advantage of the demand and the ensuing panic buying. The government now goes into overdrive as it tries to pacify a concerned public about their food supply.
Another culprit found was land conversion. Land initially planted to rice was converted to some other high income crop. Since one of the high gobblers of land right now in the Philippines is the burgeoning biofuels industry some sectors have started to clamp down on its implementation.
After reading on this issue a few weeks, I can only surmise that the only way for the biofuel sector to side step this issue is to concentrate their efforts and resources in making use of high yield crops that can grow in marginal land (unsuitable for farm crops.)
While the rice crisis is happening people should also notice that World Fuel Prices has reached an all time high this week (1 Barrel = $114 as of this writing). The high price of oil is also a problem that should be looked into because pretty soon the Philippine Economy might grind to a halt if people can’t afford to pay for their gasoline anymore.
The good thing about this (if there is a good thing), is that we are hit with the hard reality that Agriculture has long been a neglected sector in the Philippines and this definitely has to be addressed. Now that we acknowledge the problem, we can begin to act on it.
[source]
Category: Law, Food vs Fuel
