IN his letter (Inquirer, 11/25/09), vice presidential wannabe Jejomar Binay wrote about the “key to solution to the rice shortage.” He sees it as the surest way for this country to stop being the world’s largest importer of rice. Irrigating 1.5 million hectares of our available arable lands should do the trick.
Indeed, it is a trick. For that to happen, he sees the government shouldering the enormous cost it would entail in taxpayers’ money. Is he being ingenuous or is he just pulling our leg? It’s not going to happen. Since when has any regime of our brand of government given us any cause for hopeful expectations of that sort? With our present government already being “honored” as one of the most, if not the most, corrupt in the whole world, is there any hope for such a proposition? And since anyone could remember, every regime that ruled this country had its own surfeit of scams and scandals.
The true key to rice sufficiency is corporate farming in the hands of the private sector. Parceled farming, as it is done right now, where individual farmers till their small lots from sunrise to sunset, is nothing but a romanticization of a stupid concept. Our agrarian reform, as it is implemented now, is as loony as it gets. Most of these farmers end up mortgaging or selling their farm lots for sheer lack of credit facilities and farm-to-market infrastructure. Banking and financial institutions have been quite cynical when it comes to lending money to farmers without any collateral. The Land Bank is supposed to be there for them, but its branch offices are mostly found in urban centers and lend huge amounts of money mostly to capitalist nabobs who have sufficient securities to offer. Thus, these farmers are forced to borrow money from usurers in their neck of the woods who charge astronomical interests. At the end of the day, they become poorer and less productive.
It’s a snowball’s chance in hell seeing our political culture transmogrify for the better in our lifetime. Trust anything to our government and, as surely as the sun rises in the east, we will wake up one morning all screwed up! Corporate farming by the private sector is the only way to go.
—STEPHEN L. MONSANTO,
slmonsanto@yahoo.com.ph
