The National Food Summit, like other summits launched by the government in the past to supposedly address emergency situations, has been reduced to a self-serving publicity stunt, making the false impression that the rice crisis is being addressed as well as to justify current policies.

Similar to Gloria Arroyo’s speech at the Energy Summit last January which failed to address the urgent issue of high and increasing petroleum prices, her speech at the Food Summit held today did not mention anything about the need to control the soaring retail prices of rice in the local market. With Gloria Arroyo’s empty rhetoric on food security, the people gained nothing concrete from the summit. Worse, the measures announced by Arroyo will lead the country to more food crises in the future.

In her speech, Arroyo outlined her agenda to address the crisis and used the acronym FIELDS for fertilizer, irrigation and infrastructure, education and extension services, loans, dryers and post-harvest facilities, and seeds supposedly to make food abundant and accessible. But the FIELDS actually forms part of Arroyo’s existing medium-term development plan on agriculture which puts heavy emphasis on agribusiness development and not genuine agrarian reform and self-sufficient food production.

It is condemnable that the Arroyo regime is using the current rice crisis to justify and further implement the same flawed agricultural policies that helped worsen the country’s food insecurity. The emphasis on agribusiness development is a further setback to genuine agrarian reform and will worsen landlessness in the countryside. Note that the farmers’ displacement from the means of agricultural production especially land, lack of incentive and support to produce for domestic consumption, and restructuring to serve the global market have combined to perpetrate the permanent and worsening crisis of food insecurity that the country has been facing.

Arroyo’s renewed push for the farm as collateral policy, for instance, shows Arroyo’s bias for the market and lack of intention to implement a genuine agrarian reform program. This will only strengthen the monopoly control of agribusiness corporations, including foreign firms, as well as local landlords and capitalists on the country’s agriculture and farm lands at the expense of small Filipino farmers. It will only further make local agricultural production serve the needs of foreign markets at the expense of domestic food production, including rice, for domestic consumption. It will also make the consumers more vulnerable to supply and price manipulation by unscrupulous private traders.

Clearly, the Arroyo regime does not have the policies to effectively deal with the problem of skyrocketing rice prices and insecurity in the country’s food supply. Worse, the set of policy measures that the government is proposing threatens to further aggravate these problems.

The immediate state intervention needed today is to impose price controls on rice, dismantle the rice cartel, and strengthen the role of the National Food Authority (NFA) in the whole rice sector.

Meanwhile, the only sustainable long-term solution to the rice crisis is the reversal of globalization policies on agriculture and the implementation of a genuine agrarian reform program that will allow our farmers to produce food for Filipinos as well as other needs of the economy for its industrialization.