The 21st of October is Philippine Peasant Day. On this day in 1972, exactly a month after declaring Martial Law, Ferdinand Marcos issued Presidential Decree No. 27, the bogus land reform law by which the Dictator effected not the redistribution of land to its tillers but the reconcentration of tenanted rice and corn lands in the hands of new landlords. The Philippine peasant movement thus observes this day as a day of protest.
Bogus farmer emancipation and agricultural development programs have continued to plague the Filipino peasantry through the 48 years that have passed since Marcos’s issuance of PD 27. Today, among the biggest problems that Filipino peasants face are the effects and false assurances of Republic Act 11203, the Rice Tarrification Law (RTL) that Congress passed in February 2019, purportedly to develop Philippine “rice competitiveness” in the global “free market”.
Replacing rice import quotas with tariffs, and stripping the National Food Authority of its regulatory functions, the RTL resulted in the importation of nearly three million metric tons of rice in 2019, the reduction of the amounts of locally produced rice purchased by both the NFA and local traders, and a dramatic decline in the palay price from a high of P22.50 per kilo at the start of 2019 to a low of P10.50 by the start of 2020.
But the Covid 19 pandemic broke the price fall. By the second quarter of 2020, the palay price had climbed back to P18-P21 per kilo. This was because of a pronounced increase in the NFA’s local procurement operations and a general decrease in importation, which the Bureau of Plant Industry attributed to lockdowns in the exporting countries and an outright export ban in Vietnam. Vietnam and Thailand were the country’s top source of rice imports.
Yet this October, the palay price has again fallen. Agriculture Secretary William Dar claims that the price of dry palay is P18-P19 per kilo, while that of wet palay is P14 per kilo. But according to APIT TAKO members in the Cordillera’s prime rice and corn producing areas in Kalinga and Ifugao, the actual buying price is only P14-P15 for dry palay and P10-12.50 for wet. Because it is the rainy season, and they have no drying equipment of their own, most peasants have been forced to sell their palay wet. Given that the prices of inputs have not gone down and that the production cost of palay has remained the same, at approximately P12-P16 per kilo excluding the value of the farming household’s labor, many peasants do not know whether they can shoulder the costs of producing their next crop on their own, or whether they will have to turn to input creditors – indeed, whether they can plant at all.
The drop in the palay price can be attributed to a rebound in both rice importation and local production, coupled with a decline in consumption. Encouraged by second quarter prices, more peasants planted more palay in the third quarter of 2020, increasing their harvest area by 16% from the same period in 2019, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. Meanwhile, importers bought rice from Thailand and China. By end August, they had imported 1.64 million tons. But Filipino households were striving to reduce their spending even on the most basic of necessities because their incomes had contracted drastically. Filipinos were facing the worst crisis ever. Ibon estimated that the number of unemployed and underemployed in August ranged from 20 to 27 million, and that the number of persons living below the official poverty threshold of P71 per day ranged from 23 to 28 million – the result of the Covid 19 quarantine measures that were wrecking the economy.
Neither rice importation nor the lowered price of local palay has resulted in lower retail prices for milled rice. These still range from P38 to P56 per kilo. A Filipino worker earning an average of P351 per day would have to spend 22% to 32% of his or her daily wage to provide his or her household with rice at the normal consumption rate of two kilos per day.
Access to milled rice at the said price range is also a problem for those Cordillera peasants who do not produce palay or can only do so in insufficient quantities. These are the peasants who produce mainly corn or vegetables, and those who engage mainly in the production of diverse subsistence crops. They comprise the majority of the Cordillera’s peasantry.
The peasants in the vegetable producing areas of Benguet, Ifugao, and the Mountain Province are struggling to survive the shrinkage of the economy and the concomitant contraction of the market for their produce. Except for potato, which consistently fetches a higher price than other crops, the vegetables most commonly grown in the Cordillera were priced at only P1 to P50 per kilo from March to August. During the same period, there were times when even potatoes had no buyers, and vegetable farmers had to dump their produce on roadsides or give these away, for free. The hardest hit were the carrot, tomato, and wongbok farmers, whose produce were often priced between P1 and P5 per kilo.
The prices of carrots and tomatoes have improved since September, but the price of wongbok has remained depressed, and that of cabbage has dropped from a high of P50 per kilo in mid-May to a low of P3 this mid-October. Next to potatoes, cabbage is the most common crop in the Cordillera’s vegetable belt.
The demand for Cordillera vegetables is at an all-time low because many hotels, restaurants, and other food service establishments have been operating at only half their capacity or not at all, and because households have been cutting down on their food expenses.
Some local government units have tried to assist vegetable farmers by arranging to sell their produce through the Kadiwa marketing scheme. And some entrepreneurs have tried to help through online selling. But the volume that both the Kadiwa and online networks are able to absorb is too small to make a big difference.
The Cordillera’s corn farmers are similarly incurring heavy losses, though not entirely due to the Covid 19 crisis. The corn they produce is normally absorbed by hog feeds processing mills. But the spread of African swine fever early this year, and again in recent months, has forced many hog raisers out of operation and caused the hog feeds market to shrink. The situation has been exacerbated by the Covid 19 crisis. With decreased demand for hog feeds, the corn price in Kalinga and Ifugao has declined, from a 2019 high of P14 per kilo to the current low of P11 per kilo of dry corn, and from a 2019 high of P12 per kilo to the current low of P8 per kilo of fresh corn.
The current crisis is a source of valuable lessons for the Cordillera peasantry:
- No matter what type of production they engage in, this is now inextricably linked with the market, and thus their situation is inextricable from the whole of the national economy.
- The relief that was somehow provided by the Covid 19 pandemic from the ravages of the Rice Tariffication Law could only be temporary, and they must thus continue to fight for the repeal of this law.
- Until national policy changes, there is little they can expect from government, especially in terms of market interventions. Thus, peasants must look to their own welfare. It is time they consider rediversifying their crops to ensure food sufficiency for their own households.
- It is imperative to push for policies that place agriculture, national food sufficiency, and the food producing peasantry at the top of the list of the state’s priorities!
Thus, we urge our fellow peasants: Onward with the struggle for change!
APIT TAKO
Alliance of Peasants in the Cordillera
Peasant sectoral formation of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance
Regional Chapter, Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas
16 Loro St., Dizon Subdivision., 2600 Baguio City
apittako@protonmail.com