Food

Francis Tiu Laurel, 59, is the new secretary of Agriculture, vice, President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr., the Oxford-educated son and namesake of the president who achieved a rice surplus and launched the Green Revolution in the Philippines in the 1970s.

Having failed to bring down rice retail price to P20 per kilo and stop a runaway food-shortage-driven inflation, Marcos Jr. has come down to earth, given up, and given the job to the guy who knows best, Francis Tiu (Laurel is an adopted name).

Francis brings to his job 30 years of experience hunting for and harvesting food, from the deep ocean, that is, bring it up from the sea to the seafood restaurant, or from sea to the canning factory.

Few food tycoons have the wealth and depth of his experience – invest hard earned money, risk life and limb braving the waves and the winds, and bring bountiful catch from the deep up to the safety of land and consumer hands. Fishing is one of the most profitable enterprises; depending on how you market your catch, you can multiply your cash 10 to 20 times your capital. Provided you are as big as Francis’ Frabelle Fishing Corp. whose motto is, “nobody does it better”, fish from ocean to table.

Frabelle is a conglomerate – “deep-sea fishing, aquaculture, canning, food manufacturing and processing, food importation and trading, cold storage, shipyard operations, wharf development, real estate development, and power generation;” “over 100 vessels, and a growing workforce of 5,000; the go-to source for fresh, frozen, and processed seafood, with a market that extends to Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, and the United States.” In 2019, the latest year for which data is available, Frabelle reported total revenues of P3.5 billion.

Unfortunately, 99.9 percent of fishermen are unlike Frabelle. Filipino fishermen are the poorest of the poor. In 2021, because of Chinese presence in Panatag Shoal, the income of a fisherman per trip went down 70 percent to P300 – probably not enough for Francis’s coffee money. Fishing is the slowest growing sector of Philippine agriculture. In 2022, livestock grew 2.5 percent, poultry 1.8 percent, while crops declined 1.0 percent, and fisheries went down 6.7 percent.

Anyway, our main problem is rice, not fish which costs ten times more than a kilo of rice. In early October, bangus a kilo in Manila was P220; yellow-fin tuna P280 to P400; chicken, P170/kilo. Rice? Just P40 a kilo.

Food inflation raised Philippine inflation to 6.1 percent in September 2023, after hitting 4.7 percent in July 2023 and 5.3 percent in August 2023. From January to September 2023, inflation averaged 6.6 percent, thanks to high food prices.

Of the 6.1 percent average rise in overall September prices, more than half (58.3 percent) or 3.6 percentage points were because of higher prices of rice, up 17 percent, and other food items.

Of the 6.1 points of inflation, 1.74 percentage points came from rice, .83 from vegetables and fruits, and .35 (one third of one percent) from fish. So fish is not our problem. Most Filipinos don’t buy it. Rice is. All Filipinos buy it. Each consumes 118 kilos of rice yearly.

Philippine agriculture is in deep shit, thanks to decades of government neglect and private sector indifference (except for the likes of food tycoons Ramon S. Ang of San Miguel and Manny V. Pangilinan of Metro Pacific Investments Corp.).

In 1960, the Philippines was an economic power. About 39.5 percent of its economic production or GDP came from agriculture. By 1999, rice was still 16 percent of value added in agriculture and 3.5 percent of GDP.

Today, agriculture’s share of GDP or total economic production is down to 8.5 percent, a historic low.

Subtract 8.5 percent from 39.5 percent, you get 31. Multiply 31 percent of a P20-trillion GDP, you get P6.2 trillion. That is the value of loss in our agricultural production in 63 years. Now, P6.2 trillion (6,200 billion pesos) can buy you today, at P40 per kilo, 152.5 billion kilos of rice. That is enough rice to feed 1.2 billion humans for one whole year.

Note: 63 years ago, the International Rice Research Institute was established in Los Baños, Laguna. We also have the world’s premier agricultural school, UP College of Agriculture in Los Baños, Laguna. And we have our own Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), 1985. In terms of rice technology, the Philippines has the best globally, equivalent to being able to send a man to the moon. We taught the Thais and the Vietnamese how to grow rice.

Yet, the Philippines suffers from a severe food shortage; 25 percent of demand has to be imported. The Philippines is the biggest rice importer in the world. Our agriculture is a mess. One of every five Filipinos is dirt poor, thanks to high food prices. Ten percent of 23 million Filipino families experienced hunger once in the past three months.

Today, Filipinos spend 32,414 hours a year on social media, mostly an unproductive enterprise. The Filipino farmer spends just 2,000 hours a year planting rice. If half of the 32,000 hours spent on social media were devoted to growing something, we could probably solve our malnutrition and hunger problems overnight.

Speaking of private sector indifference, the Philippine banking system has total loans outstanding of P12 trillion. Only P256.7 billion went to agriculture, just 2.13 percent of the banks’ total lending. Why? The Bangko Sentral requires banks to devote 25 percent of total loans to agriculture. Shouldn’t BSP be cracking the whip on these banks? Some of the banks make P200 million daily, operating just 7 hours a day.

Banks, the most profitable enterprises in the Philippines, do not provide money to produce food, which is up to half of total expenditures of Filipinos.

Shared prosperity? Nah.

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