Commentary: Why we don’t have enough food to eat

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DESPITE the urbanization that has been taking place in many parts of the country in recent decades, the Philippines remains an agricultural country — although economically, we are not.

But neither are we an industrial economy.  We are a service economy.

Sadly, this urbanization is taking place at the expense of agriculture. Without any regard for sound land use, we are turning our farms into cement forests, which have adversely impacted our agriculture, food security, and the environment. Our aquifers have dried up—and we will sooner than later run out of water to drink—because rainwater can no longer seep through the soil that we have covered with concrete. And those concrete add to the rising temperatures we have been experiencing.

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But that’s another issue altogether. Let’s go back to farming.

Just look at the stretch of the old national highway and the South Luzon Expressway from Calamba in Laguna to Alabang in Muntinlupa, which I used to travel 10 to 20 times back and forth every year when I was growing up.  Where crops bloomed 30-50 years ago now stand high-rise buildings, condominiums, hotels, malls, and residential subdivisions.  Not a single stalk of palay or sugar cane or corn. Go north all the way to Pampanga and Tarlac and the picture looks almost the same.

Even in provinces away from Metro Manila—including those in the Visayas and Mindanao—malls and subdivisions are invading farmlands, as far as anybody’s eyes can see.  The builders and developers all bear the names of the country’s top billionaire businessmen, including those who hold high positions in government, whether elective or appointive.

Just how much agricultural land we’ve lost, no one knows, nobody has a record—not the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, not the Department of Agriculture, not the Philippine Statistics Authority, not the local government units that grant the permits for the building of malls, etcetera. Nobody cares.

Add to this the land, including agricultural, that is now being used to build solar farms.  At least one member of Congress recently raised concerns over this.

Add to all these the domination by trade cartels that manipulate prices and supply—that we have been investigating for decades yet have not haled anyone to court or even just identified and arrested.

No wonder that the share of agriculture to our gross domestic product (GDP) has gone down to single digits in the last 10-20 years. The decline in GDP share would be pardonable if there is a corresponding increase in agricultural production or in manufacturing.  But no. Both agricultural production and productivity are going down.  And the share of manufacturing/industry to GDP is not growing either.

Instead, our economy is 62 percent service, 30 percent industry (manufacturing), and 8 percent agriculture. We are largely a service economy.  So, we are neither producing enough food from our farms nor processing them in factories, nor making the other goods that we purchase every day. Instead, we have huge malls where farms used to be from which we buy nearly all things imported.

No wonder, seven out of every 10 poor Filipinos are found in the rural areas where our farms and farmers are. No wonder that more than 30 percent of farmers and fishermen live below the poverty line, the highest incidence among all sectors of society.

No wonder the price of onion skyrocketed to 750 pesos per kilo in late 2022 when six months earlier farmers in Occidental Mindoro let their onions rot instead of selling to trade cartels at 10-12 pesos per kilo.

No wonder we import as much as 1.1 million tons of rice and 350,000 tons of galunggong and other fish a year.

One can list so many things wrong with our agriculture—high cost of inputs, lack of technology, lack of infrastructure, etc.

But the basic thing wrong is this:  we are not using our land properly and rationally. Instead of treating land as a resource from which we can and should produce the things we need, we turned land into the most precious and expensive commodity in the country.

That’s why our richest businessmen, the microcosmic number of billionaires, are all in property acquisition and development—turning every square meter of farmland they could get their hands on into building plantations and billions of pesos in their bank accounts.

All these happen because, until now, we don’t have a National Land Use Law that will prescribe how we use our limited and valuable land resources. This is one law that Congress has failed to enact since 1987 despite its constitutional mandate.

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