Avoiding hunger

The prospect of masses of people going hungry can be politically dangerous for a government. Nothing fuels a violent revolt more than hunger.

Yet, we have this almost annual recurrence of a rice supply crisis of some form year after year.

I grew up in Paco, an area of Manila a few blocks from an office of the Rice and Corn Administration. It is now known as the National Food Authority.

Seeing long lines of people outside this office getting their rice ration was a regular occurrence. Maybe a typhoon or a drought caused the rice harvest to be insufficient to cover the people’s needs. Or the lack of infrastructure to bring harvests to markets.

This rice supply problem was already serious decades ago. Of course, the population of the Philippines in 1960 was just 28 million. We are 100 million more now, a hundred million more mouths to feed.

Then again too, this was before the Green Revolution and the Masagana 99 and the progress achieved by the scientists in Los Baños that has tremendously improved the productivity of rice farming. But then as now, our government consistently fails in its mission to grow enough rice.

It is ironic that our UP Los Baños scientists have successfully helped our neighbors improve their rice production capability so that we now buy a good part of our rice needs from them. Why are we finding it difficult to plant and harvest enough to feed ourselves?

We have many excuses. We blame the typhoons, the climate and the fact that we do not have the great rivers our Southeast Asian neighbors have to irrigate the rice fields. This year, we can blame the supposedly worst El Niño in history. We can blame the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz that is causing havoc on fertilizer supply. And the list goes on.

But the thing is… all our excuses are givens. These are problems to surmount. Are we more prepared this time?

Probably not. It seems our government is preconditioned to repeat past mistakes. Recurring rice crises persist because political survival drives administrations to use band-aid solutions rather than executing systemic agricultural reform.

Administrations are addicted to short-term measures like subsidies and price caps while failing to address underlying supply-chain inefficiencies and production deficits. This leads to continued dependence on the global market, a study by PIDS, a government economic think tank observed.

Agriculture journalist Fermin Diaz sent me a copy of the latest Philippine Food Systems Review (May 2026) that was prepared by the Foodlink Advocacy Cooperative from inputs of key agri stakeholders, government data, industry reports and academic papers. And boy, do we have problems.

“Our latest data,” the report says, “reveals a food system battling profound policy disconnects, severe climate anomalies and massive logistical bottlenecks. While macro-interventions are in play, localized friction is heavily impacting both rural producers and urban consumers.”

The main takeaway, the survey points out is that the Philippine food system is suffering because the government aggressively subsidizes the importation of food commodities to combat inflation, but allows an unregulated, consolidated network of middlemen to intercept all the financial savings.

At the national level, we are still feeling the negative effects of tariff cuts that flooded the market with 2.22 million MT of imported rice, but the government allowed exploitative traders to keep urban prices high while crashing rural farmgate prices.

In Luzon, the key concern is a staggering 25.5 percent of the national GDP lost because of faulty logistics, with up to 45 percent of high-value crops destroyed in transit due to broken supply chains.

In the Visayas, the severe inter-island transport bottlenecks drive massive geographic penalties on agricultural inputs. In vulnerable regions, basic food survival now absorbs 65.4 percent of a rural worker’s daily wage.

In Mindanao, the region is absorbing asymmetric hyper-inflation (10.2 percent in Caraga) driven by private hoarding that will be worsened by “Super” El Niño wiping out vital staple grains.

To assure adequate food stocks this year, our government must decisively deal with commercial traders who last year artificially stopped local buying to force our farmers to sell to them at distressed prices while the NFA proved useless.

Middlemen bought local palay for as low as P8 per kilo and sold imported rice to consumers at P50 per kilo, capturing windfall profits and failing to pass the benefits from lower import tariffs to the public.

The second point raised by the survey is that with 11 to 13 million hectares of degraded topsoil and an impending El Niño, the physical base of agriculture cannot withstand water stress.

The third point: A 60,000-kilometer backlog in farm-to-market roads and reliance on archaic packaging will make it certain we will have a catastrophic 40 percent post-harvest loss rate, physically destroying value before reaching the market.

What must we do? The review suggests some action plans:

Our government must legally bind importers and commercial warehouse operators benefiting from reduced tariffs to predetermined wholesale margin caps.

Any state funds used for FMR construction or post-harvest mechanization must legally require a joint management board where local farmers’ associations and marginalized transport workers have structural voting power.

Enforcing rigid, community-level biosecurity protocols requires strict compliance. But the government must not penalize backyard farmers by making sure there is a no-fault indemnification for culled livestock.

The survey concludes that our domestic food supply is currently caught between two extremes: absorbing over P3 billion in agricultural damage from typhoons and moisture stress, while also bracing for an 82 to 92 percent possibility of a severe El Niño event that will cripple 55 percent of the nation’s rain-fed fields.

BBM should use the next few weeks to organize his administration’s response and reassure the public that this time around, they will prevent greedy and unscrupulous traders from victimizing farmers and consumers like last year.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco