The two successive typhoons, Lando and Mina, that unleashed their fury in the country one after the other had wrought severe damage to rice, corn, vegetable and other agricultural crops in the provinces they cut through. Worse, Lando was even making a comeback to the Philippines as if its devastation was not enough. Only a few months ago, the country’s ricefields and farmlands were devastated by the adverse effects of drought due to prolonged dry spell. Such unpredictable climate change is really a cause of concern and not imagined dangers of global warming now lurking in our midst.
At the height of these storms, Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap was kneeling down in prayers at the Vatican, pleading for God’s mercy to spare the Philippines from devastation wrought by these typhoon-related calamities. Yap was in Rome last week attending the 34th General Assembly of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Yap took the opportunity to make these fervent prayers after he and his 30 other fellow agriculture secretaries and ministers were received in audience by Pope Benedict XVI at the Clementine Chapel at the Vatican on Nov. 22.
Yap is now back in Manila and related to us how he prayed hard that he could bring with him the Pope’s blessings to him and his counterpart agriculture officials who attended the General Assembly of the Rome-based FAO. In his chat with us at the Tuesday Club breakfast gathering at the EDSA Shangri-La yesterday, Yap especially remembered the Pope’s exhortations to them to help “feed the world” in order to live up with the FAO motto Fiat panis, emblazoned to its logo.
The FAO’s Latin motto, Fiat panis, as translated into English, is “let there be bread!” The Pope, Yap quoted him telling them, has “evangelical” message. As if his prayers were answered, he disclosed yesterday that FAO is sending a mission to Manila around the first quarter of 2008 to help review the implementation of anti-hunger and poverty-mitigation programs and projects being undertaken by the Philippine government.
The Philippines is a member of the FAO, one of the organizations of the United Nations (UN). The FAO has about 192 member states. This was founded on Oct. 16, 1945 in Quebec City, Canada. It is a specialized agency of the UN that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. The FAO acts as a neutral forum where all nations, both developed and developing, help one another to modernize and improve agriculture, forestry and fisheries practices, ensuring good nutrition and food security for all.
Jacques Diouf, from Senegal, is currently the head of the FAO. Incidentally, Diouf flew to Manila to personally hand to President Arroyo the FAO “Ceres Award” in 2004. I distinctly recall this because I was still assigned at Malacanang Palace where I covered the awarding rites held on Feb. 20, 2004. The Ceres Award is named after the mythological Roman goddess of harvest. The FAO Ceres award to Mrs. Arroyo was no myth though. Previous FAO “Ceres” awardees included women leaders like the late Mother Teresa, Queen Sirikit of Thailand, Prime Minister Helen Clark of New Zealand, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, and Prime Minister Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, among others.
In her acceptance speech of that award, the President thanked the FAO for this award and she made this vow: “And you have my solemn pledge, in return, that I will continue to do what’s right, to do my best to help eliminate hunger and mass poverty in my country, in our region, in the world.”
It is thus timely to remind the Commander-in-Chief about her FAO Ceres Award if only to shake up the administration from this hunger situation in our country as being indicated from hunger incidence survey findings. The Social Weather Stations (SWS) reported about 3.8 million Filipino families continue to experience involuntary hunger. This was based from the survey conducted from Sept. 2 to 5 this year with 1,200 statistically representative household heads in Metro Manila, Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. Families experiencing involuntary hunger, according to this SWS survey, rose to 21.5 percent from 19 percent in November 2006 and February 2007. The SWS explained the measure refers to involuntary suffering because the respondents answer a survey question that specifies hunger due to lack of anything to eat.
The FAO Ceres Award given to the Chief Executive came after her administration successfully implemented its hybrid rice program in 2001. It was a rice variety developed in China and brought here in the Philippines as part of the fruits of the state visit she made to China in November 2001. The Agriculture Department, through the National Food Authority (NFA) headed then by Yap who was its administrator at that time, promoted the use of the hybrid rice from China they named “Gloria” after her. The adoption of “Gloria” rice variety was credited for the doubling of rice production in terms of per hectare harvest of palay. Regular palay seeds could produce 80 cavans per hectare. But this hybrid palay seed raised production to as much as 290 cavans per hectare.
Despite the drought and typhoons, Yap noted with optimism that the country’s rice production is still within this year’s target of 15.8 to 16 million metric tons (MT) from the revised original target of 16.3 million MT. If this target would be achieved this year, it would definitely be the highest level of rice production.
With the global warming that affects the weather system, such destructive typhoons and droughts in the country are force majeure phenomena that adversely impair our food production capacity. As the country’s food staple is rice, our palay production must feed a nation of over 80 million Filipinos. Since the Arroyo administration also closely hews to the Vatican’s promotion of natural birth control, there is no other recourse but to increase our rice and food yield at a much higher rate than we produce more mouths to feed.
