As in most South East Asian countries, rice is the basic staple food of the Philippines, where it is grown on

about a third of all farmland by an estimated one million rural households.1  However, growing rice by no means assures one of having enough to eat. According to a 1986 report, farm children in Central Luzon, the Philippine rice bowl, had among the highest rates of malnutrition in the country. During the 1980s about 70% of all Filipinos were 40-60% deficient in protein intake and 40-80% deficient in caloric intake.2 In 1995, the Philippine National Statistics Board estimated that one out of five of all Filipinos could not afford to feed themselves. That year two out of five Philippine families fell below the official poverty line of 7,212 pesos (about U.S.$277) annual income.3

Despite this perilous state of food insecurity, the government was ill-prepared for the crisis that erupted in August 1995, when the price of rice doubled throughout the country. The rice price jump consumed at least a fifth of the official minimum daily wage. To avoid food riots, the government's mobile rice caravans distributed the meager rice stocks of the National Food Administration (NFA) in Manila's poor

neighborhoods.4

Peasant organizations and consumer groups rejected government accusations that farmer and consumer hoarding had caused the crisis. Instead, they demanded government support for national grain production and increased NFA purchases of domestically produced rice to sell to consumers at stable prices. NFA had bought less than one percent of 1994's bumper rice harvest, the least in the agency's history. The rest of the crop was bought by rice traders who were able to drive up the price by withholding stocks from the market. Despite another bumper rice crop in 1995, the government imported extra stocks from Thailand and Vietnam and sold them through the NFA at pre-crisis prices.5

The government at first denied that Big Seven Cartel rice traders had caused artificial shortages to drive up prices. However, the National Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Internal Revenue were forced to examine Cartel operations after the traders' prices for rice stayed at their crisis levels despite government intervention to lower prices. However, the government said that it was powerless to act against the Cartel, due to inadequacies in the legal system.6

In August 1996, an official announced that government credit programs had increased rice output and that reserve stocks were on hand for 70 days7: the Philippines would probably not need to import more rice in 1996 than the 846,000 metric tonnes already imported. Nonetheless, many Filipinos lack access to staples, and rural communities are reportedly eating the seeds for rice and corn. Meanwhile, the supply and price crisis has spread to meat, eggs, wheat and corn.8

Beyond The Uruguay Round

In 1996, a year of high world prices for grains, the Philippine government enacted trade legislation that exceeds the compliance schedule for its commitments under the Uruguay Round (UR) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA). In May, the Speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives, José de Venecia, obtained passage of The Agricultural Tariffication Act (Republic Act 8178).9  RA 8178 abolishes quantitative restrictions on agricultural imports and repeals vital provisions of the 1992 Magna Carta of Small Farmers (R.A. 7607), which prohibited imports of certain agricultural commodities if those commodities are produced locally in sufficient quantity. With the passage of RA 8178, the government has removed even those minimal import restrictions allowed under the UR, and Philippine Aggregate Measures of Support for agricultural commodities are no more than half the levels allowed by the Philippines' UR commitments.10

Cargill, the giant U.S.-based agribusiness, together with the U.S. Embassy in Manila, lobbied heavily for RA 8178's passage. The lobbying effort implemented Cargill's belief that "self-sufficiency is not a practical answer to Asia's growing food demand."11  (Daniel Amstutz, a former Chief Executive Officer in Cargill's futures trading and commodities division, played a pivotal role in drafting the UR as the Reagan Administration's Chief Negotiator for Agriculture.12) U.S. threats of trade sanctions for violating UR commitments helped to overcome Philippine congressional resistance to the legislation.13

In a 1994 review of all the Philippine laws that would have to be abolished or changed in order to conform with the UR agreements, one commentator wondered: "Are you saying that we do not need the legislative branch of the government? That Congress would just need to pass an enabling act: 'All those laws, provisions, articles, sections that are deemed inconsistent with GATT coverage and agreement are hereby repealed'?"14

In addition to legislative repeal of food security, President Fidel Ramos has been issuing Executive Orders that will "liberalize" other aspects of the Philippine economy even beyond the degree of trade liberalization called for by APEC trade ministers in their July 1996 meeting. At that meeting, the Philippines, opposed only by Japan and Korea, joined other APEC countries in following the U.S. call for preparing further agricultural trade liberalization as the UR AoA terms expire in the year 2000.15

"Super Rice": A Solution to Philippine Food Insecurity?

"Biotech offers best hope for a hungry world," reads a headline in the Financial Times.16 Yet South East Asians who relied on "Miracle Rice" (IR8) developed by the Philippine-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), have cause to be skeptical about the promises of the IRRI's new biotech "Super Rice."

Through expanding irrigated land and quintupling fertilizer use, IRRI claims that the annual growth rate in rice production increased from 2.3% per annum before 1964 to 4.5% between 1965 and 1980.17 However, while using a constant amount of fertilizer, rice yields at IRRI's research farm decreased at a rate of 1.25% per year from 1966 to 1987, a decline of 27.5% in 21 years. From 1966 to 1980, IR8's yield fell from 9.5 tons per hectare to about 2 tons per hectare while still receiving 120 kilograms of pure nitrogen fertilizer per hectare.18 Yet by 1990, IR8 and similar varieties were planted on about 80% of Philippine rice crop area.19

When IR8 and its cousins left the research farm and entered the harsher environment of agriculture in the countryside, the infamous "side" effects of rice production began to dwarf the fame of the Green Revolution. These "side" effects included pesticide-caused deaths of rice farmers, estimated at 4,000 in the Philippines alone during the 21-year life of IR8; polluted groundwater and soil degradation; lowered nutritional quality (measured by IRRI primarily in terms of calories); loss of flavor; and social, political and economic disruption as governments altered traditional rice farming cultures to introduce IR8 and other Green Revolution rices.20

Other unanticipated effects of the Green Revolution were accelerated diseases and insect infestation from monocultural cropping. For example, according to a Philippine-based non-governmental organization (NGO), "the brown planthopper was not a major problem in 'Southeast Asia until IRRI technologies (breeding and pesticide applications) made it one. Grass stunt virus is mutating faster than breeders can match it."21

The IRRI is one of sixteen research centers in the Consultative Group of International Agriculture Research (CGIAR), the Secretariat of which is housed in the World Bank.22  Because IRRI has little direct interaction with farmers and non-laboratory farming conditions, its technological tools for dealing with pest, disease and yield problems tend to ignore resource management approaches. Biologists have criticized IRRI for assuming that the traits of an organism are encoded in a single gene that can be manipulated irrespective of its cellular and extra-cellular environments.23

Despite this history of problems and criticisms, IRRI plans to launch a new "Super Rice" that it hopes will yield 15 tons per hectare. If the high ecological and socio-economic costs of IR8 varieties are repeated in IRRI's biotech "Super Rice," farmers and consumers mat see "Super Rice" as an obstacle to food security rather than a solution towards it.

Conclusion

Various aspects of the Uruguay Round will oblige the Philippines to continue importing rice, at least in the near future, no matter what the "Super Rice" yields. The abolition of national laws to foster food security will help facilitate Cargill's vision of "an open food system"25, as well as the U.S. Department of Agriculture's target of selling Pacific Rim countries two thirds of all U.S. agricultural exports by the year 2000.26 Despite consumer and farm organization pressure for government intervention in rice production and distribution programs, the government's repeal of food-security oriented legislation and the impunity of the Big Seven Cartel of rice traders suggest continuing food insecurity for most Filipinos.

Sources

 1 Francisco J. Lara Jr., "Trade liberalisation and food security in South East Asia," Recipe for disaster?: Food security after GATT, Catholic Institute for International Relations, July 1996, 4.1.

 2 Lara, "Structural Adjustment and Trade Liberalization: Eating Away Our Food Security," Paper presented at the Conference on International Trade and Food Security: Issues for the South, May 1-3, 1991; Protestant Academy of Mulheim/Ruhr, Germany, 2.

 3 "Poverty in the Philippines," KAPATIRAN, February 7, 1996, 17. Exchange rate for August 29, 1996.

 4 Cecilia S. Ochoa and Allen M. Manano, "Assessing the damage," PHILIPPINE PEASANT INSTITUTE NEWSLETTER, November-December, 1995, 1-2.

 5 ibid.

 6 ibid.

 7 "Philippines says more rice imports unlikely in 96," REUTER, August 26, 1996.

 8 Lara, "Trade liberalisation and food security," 4.2.

 9 Kevin Watkins, "Of Myths and Perils: Agricultural Liberalization in the Philippines," FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH (Website: http://www.nautilus.org/focusweb; fax: 662-255-9976), May 26, 1996.

 10 "The APEC Gambit," PEASANT UPDATE (Quezon City, Philippines), May 24, 1996, and Lara, "Trade liberalisation and food security," 4.2-3.

 11 Rob Johnson, "APEC and the global food system," THE CARGILL BULLETIN, August 1996

 12 Mark Ritchie, "Breaking the Deadlock: The United States and Agriculture Policy in the Uruguay Round," INSTITUTE FOR AGRICULTURE AND TRADE POLICY (October 1993), 9.

 13 Kevin Watkins, "Of Myths and Perils: Agricultural Liberalization in the Philippines," FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH (Website: http://www.nautilus.org/focusweb; fax: 662-255-9976), May 26, 1996.

 14 Quoted in Teodoro C. Mendoza, "General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT): Its Impact on Agriculture and Philippine Society," College of Agriculture, University of the Philippines at Los Baños (September 8, 1994), 7.

 15 A letter from Aziz Choudry of GATT Watchdog and "Philippine 'Downpayments': Major liberalization and deregulation/privatization measures," KAPATIRAN (June 8, 1996, 2 and "U.S. To Press APEC Ministers for New Tariff Cuts In the WTO," INSIDE U.S. TRADE (July 12, 1996), 36 and "APEC Trade Ministers Endorse Built-In Agenda As Focus For Singapore," INSIDE U.S. TRADE (July 19, 1996), 20.

 16 David Richardson, "Biotech offers best hope for a hungry world: Genetic crop modification will be necessary to keep up with population growth," FINANCIAL TIMES, June 18, 1996.

 17 C.C. David et al, "Technological Change, Land Reform and Income Distribution in the Philippines," Modern Rice Technology and Income Distribution in Asia, ed. C.C. David and K. Otsuka (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1994), 51.

 18 James Sharman, "The Myth of the Super Rice and the Second Green Revolution," SACRA (April 1995), 5.

 19 David, ibid.

 20 Sharman, ibid.

 21 "Oryza Nirvana?: An NGO Review of the International Rice Research Institute in Southeast Asia: Executive Summary" Southeast Asia Regional Institute for Community Education (SEARICE), Manilla, Philippines (October 1995), 6.

 22 For a review of CGIAR, see "CGIAR Renewal: Beyond Catchy Wording?" SEEDLING (Barcelona; June 1996), 14-22.

 23 "Oryza Nirvana," 7-10.

 24 ibid., 7-10

25Johnson, Rod, "Building of open food system should be primary goal," FEEDSTUFFS, September 9, 1996.

 26 Watkins, ibid.