PSNA

Philippine Solidarity Network of Aotearoa

Kapatiran

Links

Contact Us

Archive

Issue Number 32, October 2009

• It’s Always Groundhog Day: Philippines 09
  
  There’s Blood In Your Coffee! Auckland Protest In Solidarity With Striking Filipino Nestlé Workers
  
  New Zealand Human Rights Commission Project In Philippines: Position Statement of Auckland Philippines Solidarity, Wellington Kiwi Pinoy, Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa and Migrante Aotearoa
  
  The SIS And The Philippines Solidarity Movement In Aotearoa
  
  Kiwi Unionist Reports On KMU’s 25th International Solidarity Affair
  
  The International Solidarity Mission To Surface James Balao
  
  The Writ Of Amparo And James Balao
  
  An Exposure With The KMU: Lessons In Genuine Trade Unionism
  
  New Zealand And The Philippines – Military Ties Or Peace Ties?
  
  Update
  
  US Marine Cleared Of Rape In Philippines: First Ever Conviction Of GI Ended By A Fix
  
  Scrap The VFA!
  
  Reviews by Jeremy Agar:
  
  “The Bases Of Empire: The Global Struggle Against US Military Posts” edited by Catherine Lutz
  
  “Out Of Sight, Out Of Mined” A DVD by Oxfam Australia
  
  Obituaries by Murray Horton and Dennis Maga:
  
  Cory Aquino
  
  Wilson Baldonaza
  
  Death In The Family: John Gannaway
  
  The Growing Food Crisis And The Struggle For Sovereignty
  
  Migrants’ Group Deplores Telecom & Partners’ New Model For More Unemployment
  
  

Kapatiran Issue No. 32, October 2009

THE GROWING FOOD CRISIS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SOVEREIGNTY
- Dennis Small  


Food Security, National Security and Political Sovereignty - The Question of Political Sovereignty: There is no surer way for the US or EU to keep a developing country under their thumb, than when that country has neglected its own food production capacity and is directly dependent on them for food. (Focus on Trade 57, December 2000, p30).
 
“The food security of the Filipino people should not depend on imports”, Jaime Tadeo, National Rice Farmers’ Council, (BBC News, 6/4/08).
 
The Philippines was one of those countries most afflicted in the global food crisis which broke out into the public arena in early 2008. This internationally transmitted shock has impressed the need for food security on Filipino society, i.e. reliable access to adequate food for everyone. The Philippines is now the world’s “leading rice importer”, supporting “the nation’s 90 million people” despite the achievement of “record harvests”.¹ But the struggle for genuine food security, i.e. food sovereignty, is subject as ever to deep political divisions, at the most basic level that between rich and poor.
 
As a long term client state within the de facto American empire, it has been well observed of the Philippines that it serves as a model for understanding the US’s role and purposes in the Third World. Indeed, in his “Confronting The Third World: US Foreign Policy, 1945-1980”, Professor Gabriel Kolko maintains that since the Philippines has been the country with the longest most intimate connection with the US it can be taken as the most significant exemplar of such relations.² The issue of food security is certainly central to how the US views the place of the Philippines, and so can exemplify the American vision for the world’s poor.
 
Historically Rooted Crisis
 
In a previous article in Kapatiran 18*, December 2000, on Filipino agriculture and trade, “Free Trade and Food Security”, I traced a number of factors - both historically rooted and more recent - that were undermining national food sovereignty. Emphasis was put on the damage caused by free trade policies adopted under US pressure, the burden of externally enforced debt conditions, and the rule of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The current article builds on the case previously made, extending, deepening, and updating the analysis. It draws together in more detail various historical and modern era factors to indicate the gravity and urgency of the challenge – in particular the phalanx of politico-economic forces - facing the peoples of the Philippines. *See also “Trading Away Food Security”, by Dennis Small, in Kapatiran 19, August 2001. Ed.
 
As Kolko indicates, even very early on – from 1909 in fact – the US was bullying and manipulating the Philippines for its own particular purposes.³ “To satisfy the demand for sugar, coconut products, and the like, capital investments transformed labour and land utilisation in ways that made the new rural social conditions far more exploitative and eliminated many small farmers”.⁴ In the early 21st Century, the US is still pushing the same self-serving free trade line. There is a continuity of policy that flows up to 2009 and beyond, whatever the changing emphases and dimensions involved. At the same time, the big picture has got more complicated with a number of other countries, including certain fellow Asian countries of the Pacific Rim region, also pressing the Philippines to dismantle what little means of agricultural protection it now has left at its disposal.

Population, Environment, And Resources
 
The Philippines is a country which has been blessed with abundant natural resources, including fertile, arable soils. But it has most unfortunately suffered the virtually unfettered ravages of rapacious foreign control and externally-imposed “development”. Mining, deforestation, plantation agriculture, fisheries, and other such economic enterprise have taken a horrendous toll on the land, waterways, and surrounding seas. Given the country’s cultural and socio-economic setting, continuing population growth would also always be a constant challenge for the foreseeable future. This would be true enough even if the challenge had been taken seriously in terms of humane birth control - as certainly should have long been the case - as well as the maintenance of an adequate food supply. All things considered, the perennial problem of population growth was an obvious consideration for the development planners, demanding especial attention and social mobilisation to try and ensure the maximum possible food security, as well as trying to curb the birth rate wherever practically feasible.
 
By 1968 the Philippines had actually managed to achieve self-sufficiency in rice. The main agricultural goal should then have been to guarantee this ever potentially precarious situation. Rice is the main food for most of the population and constitutes the livelihood of about half the peasantry. Corn is next in importance, with the nation’s “corn bowl” the conflict-torn island of Mindanao in the south. More than a third of the country’s labour force depends on agriculture.
 
Populating In Perspective
 
Human population size “is considered the foremost driver of biodiversity loss”, with “biodiversity” being defined in summary form as “the variety of life – in all its different forms and relationships”.⁵ A flourishing biodiversity is essential for the long term sustainability of agriculture and other forms of primary production, e.g. fisheries. Nowadays, this is more imperative than ever in a world of worsening climate change. Back in 1979, it was observed that while most countries of South East Asia had land available for agricultural expansion, the Philippines had the highest population to land ratio, with “dense and rapidly increasing populations with little, if any, spare land” on some of its islands.⁶
 
But, of course, the definition of what is actually “spare land” can be crucial. Ten years later, in 1988, Joel Rodriguez, Executive Director of the Forum for Rural Concerns, pointed to “landlessness” as a huge problem for the Philippines.⁷ Yet Rodriquez, who was also then the Deputy Secretary General of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP, Philippine Peasant Movement), pertinently observed that the 1985 tonnage of combined agricultural production “was more than enough to feed twice” the Filipino population for one whole year!⁸ Yet hunger and malnutrition were widespread. Landlessness was so often obviously due to an unjust human creation and its system of waste and export agriculture for affluent consumers overseas. “While the vast majority of Filipino peasants are without land, a minority of big landlords, compradors*, and their foreign partners own or control big tracts of agricultural lands”.⁹ Inequality in landholding lies at the root of the growing food crisis in the Philippines, and sadly enough, there has been little substantive change. In parts the problem is even getting much worse. *Comprador - a native of a colonised country who acts as the agent of the coloniser. Ed
 
The Tragic Mirage Of Land Reform
 
At the time, Rodriquez was appealing for genuine land reform from the new Aquino government (the late Cory Aquino was President from 1986-92. Ed.). But this landholding injustice still remains deeply entrenched and reflected in both the ruling Arroyo Administration and the wider Congress, however much on occasion elements of the ruling class have played up to its popular appeal. Since the days of President Marcos (1965-86) the slogan of land reform has been used in this fashion. Commercial exports still take priority over food requirements, while imports have hugely damaged production for domestic needs. Repressive rule by the landowning class and their foreign backers has dictated the adoption of neo-liberal free trade policies. NZ’s own special neo-liberal connection and input to the Philippines has been channelled mostly through the free trader Cairns Group, of which both countries have been members, and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) process, as well as related similar initiatives. Of the ten ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations), the Philippines is NZ’s third largest export market with dairy products comprising by far the biggest sales category.
 
However, having said all this, there have yet been heartening indications of the impact of peasant resistance over the years on the extent and momentum of the liberalisation agenda, as noted in more detail below. In recent times, the Philippine government has had to respond in a number of ways to growing grass/rice roots’ concerns. Moreover, the 2008 food crisis, along with the breakdown of the WTO negotiations over the key issue of agricultural protection for poorer countries, in tandem with the decline of the free trader Cairns Group - and all in the context of a widening and deepening global economic crisis - has opened up more space for progressive action on the food security issue. But the forces of reaction are gathering too and the struggle for food sovereignty is intensifying ominously.

The Assault On Food Sovereignty
 
In my previous article (Kapatiran 18, December 2000), I outlined how the agricultural free market programme was revived in the 1980s – since 1981 in fact - under US auspices, with import liberalisation really taking hold by the mid 1980s. Structural adjustment programme (SAP) conditions imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) meant deleterious competition for small farmers from subsidised foreign food products. “Deregulation” was the watchword as the country’s peasant producers were ground under the burden of debt, both internationally and locally generated. “From a position of near self-sufficiency in the mid-1980s, by 1990 the Philippines was importing some 600,000 tons of rice annually, equivalent to some 16% of national consumption”.¹⁰ Governmental support for small farmers, already at a very low level overall, suffered relatively huge cuts in subsidies for credit, infrastructure and farm inputs. This was coupled with the phasing down, or out, of price controls, as well as reduction in co-operative, small farmer-oriented support for producer and marketing arrangements. Irrigation, post-harvest storage, and other facility provision have all been debilitated.
 
While food import levels, as in the case of rice, fluctuated greatly over the years owing to the influence of varying causes, there has been a steady, accumulating erosion of self-sufficiency across a range of spheres. In the quite near past, the Philippines had often been a net exporter of food, even rice. Certainly the average level of domestic food self-reliance had been considerably higher, even leaving aside exports of sugar and edible oils. However, since the operative advent of the WTO in 1995, tariffs and quantitative restrictions have been stripped away along with other forms of agricultural protectionism, and the country had now become a regular net food importer. In particular, the Magna Carta for Small Farmers, instituted in 1991 to protect rice and corn producers by means of restrictive import measures, was gutted in 1996 to conform with the new trade conditions under the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA).
 
Creating The Neo-Liberal Culture In The WTO Era
 
These adverse changes under the WTO regime have specially applied to the dismantling of protection and support for the staples of corn and rice, besides other traditional foods. Consequently, domestic-oriented agriculture was hit very hard. “Rice imports have skyrocketed, from 200,000 tons in 1993, to 2.2 million tons in 1998. A similar scenario is true for corn, beef and pork” and the consequences have been harsh for local producers.¹¹ Acreage planted to the staple food crops of rice and corn was slashed by over half, from “5 million hectares to 1.9 million hectares”, as more land was converted to “non-traditional, ‘high value crops’ for export”, i.e. crops like flowers, mangoes, broccoli and asparagus.¹² Ironically, a growing influx of vegetable imports has sabotaged a lot of this sort of enterprise, as has also happened with various other export and substitute products. By 2000, about 350,000 jobs were being lost annually, “mainly from labour-intensive traditional crops – corn, rice and sugar”.¹³
 
Walden Bello, writing later in 2003, has aptly determined that: “Being in this multilateral body (i.e. the WTO) has been an unmitigated disaster for the country. Indeed, the appropriate term for the Philippine experience in the WTO from 1995 to 2003 is ‘multilateral punishment’ . . . One of the main by-products of membership has been the erosion of national sovereignty as the US government took a direct hand in overhauling the Philippine legal system to make it ‘WTO-consistent’. Strong US influence was exercised either through constant pressure from the US Trade Representative’s Office and US Embassy”, or directly via consulting/advisory groups, above all the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the programmes it was so instrumental in initiating, applying, and monitoring.¹⁴ For sure, it was in the area of agriculture that the impact of the WTO “has been most damaging”.¹⁵

As can be seen here from these summary observations and statistics, a drastic assault has been mounted on the domestic roots of Philippine food security in the last 15 or so years. To recap, this has stemmed from the WTO mandated programme, and from renewed American endorsement and orchestration of massive agricultural liberalisation as driven by transnational corporations (TNCs) like Cargill and co. For the most part then, market capitalism and privatisation have ruled the rural roost.
 
The Corporate Game - Cashing In On Import/Export Agriculture
 
In actuality, the powerful and pervasive influence of agribusiness TNCs - exemplified by fruit firms Del Monte and Dole - was already well established by the late 1970s, with Del Monte setting up as early as the 1920s.¹⁶ Corporate farms were run and serviced by these two TNCs, and also by others less traditionally associated with actual farming, among them oil giants Caltex (another early established TNC) and Shell, rubber companies Firestone and Good Year, and chemicals and mining conglomerate Union Carbide.¹⁷ Pineapples, bananas, rubber, sugar and coconut and other crops were grown on such farms and plantations. The proportion of ricelands in relation to the total of all croplands began to decline significantly from 1970, as did the percentage of domestic food production out of all food crops in general.¹⁸ Meantime, the area of land used for export crops grew proportionately larger. The free trade surge in imports and export crops at the expense of food self-reliance following the advent of the WTO has come after long and increasing trends in this neo-liberal direction.
 
Earlier again, during the 1970s, the Green Revolution in the Philippines had facilitated the TNC hold over the nation’s agribusiness. Given that the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the foundation agency of the Green Revolution, was based in the country, the industrial, high-tech model of agriculture soon became the dominant force for agricultural development. In a veritable multitude of ways, this new model marginalised and undermined the more vulnerable small farmers as they struggled to survive. Not only did the TNCs push food imports and exports but they made many farmers dependent on all the inputs necessary for Green Revolution-type farming, i.e. seeds, pesticides, fertilisers, and various other high-tech components – stuff that only the bigger farmers could afford.¹⁹ For example, oil/fertiliser company Esso (Exxon) set up a network of “100 agroservice centres” where it sold the whole range of such inputs with the price of “certified high-responding seeds” doubling in only a few years.²⁰
 
The Need For A Real Green Revolution
 
Green Revolution innovations could have been applied far more judiciously and constructively where appropriate if equity and environmental considerations had been upheld within an overall framework of sustainable development criteria. Such an integrative approach could have helped buy time for a transition to more ecologically balanced agricultural practice. But the capitalist compatible Green Revolution (originally so labelled by USAID) was seen very explicitly as an answer to the threat of a red Communist revolution. In practice, it has meant the rejection of sustainable agriculture in the sense of both ecology and equity.²¹
 
Organic farming in the Philippines certainly has the potential for achieving improved harvests through higher yield varieties and intensifying production as the PAKISAMA rural and non-government organisation (NGO) movement was demonstrating by the late 1990s, using MASIPAG technology.²² (MASIPAG = Farmers' and Scientists' Partnership for Agricultural Development). But, unfortunately, the corporate, free market approach has so far overwhelmingly predominated with its high-tech, industrial model of farming, adversely affecting the ultimate national interest. Yet again, as repeatedly noted in this article, there are some positive signs of alternative approaches, with even the IRRI these days trying to be more sustainable in its outlook, e.g. in some cases trying to reduce pesticide requirements.
 
At the same time, it still needs to be remembered that the IRRI and related bodies are very much tailored to globalist corporate expectations. The IRRI, as indicated, was tied to TNC interests from the start. “The USAID, in conjunction with grant making bodies like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, put up the money needed to establish and run the Manila-based IRRI, the function of which is to develop high-responding varieties of seed, according to the principles of the Green Revolution”.²³ The IRRI’s basic function of new seed development is currently supplemented by other activities. This organisation has been assisting Filipino policy makers with the effects of trade liberalisation on rice self-sufficiency and overall food security. Development, trials, and application of new rice varieties regularly involve the participation of private companies, including TNCs like Bayer, Pioneer and Syngenta. Such activity is clearly set within the determining parameters of the TNC-driven free trade programme, and so facilitative of further foreign control.
 
Comparative Disadvantages
 
From the 1970s then, Philippine exports of cash crops were increasingly promoted at the expense of food self-sufficiency. Yet the very next decade of the 1980s provided a graphic illustration of some of the obvious pitfalls inherent in this approach. The case of the island of Negros and sugar is most illuminating. It can be seen in terms of the global conditions constraining the Philippines. “Government policy has been to promote exports of primary commodities, the nation’s ostensible comparative advantage . . . Exports of wood products, fish, prawns, minerals, and pesticide-intensive crops have been promoted to earn foreign exchange so that the debt burden can be serviced and the development repercussions have at times been serious.
 
“On its most fertile land, on the island of Negros in particular, production was switched from local foods to sugar. This involved concentrating the land into plantations. After sugar prices dropped below costs (falling from 22 cents per pound in 1981 to five cents per pound in 1986), child malnutrition became rampant in an area of very productive farmland”.²⁴ Here we have failure on the basis of all the development economics criteria, including poverty, inequality, employment, and sustainability. Poor people have been forced to grow their crops on the most marginal land. The Philippines was indeed the country most affected by this international sugar crisis. Internally, the rot came from the top as “under President Marcos a government company pocketed much of the sugar revenue and let the industry run down”.²⁵ In the American neo-colonial tradition, TNC exploitation regularly goes hand in hand with corrupt, crony capitalism.
 
Protectionism And Free Trade
 
Cane sugar, traditionally for centuries a major Third World export crop, has been in the modern era an agricultural commodity subject to a broad spectrum of very unfavourable market and politico-economic forces. In the 1980s, the US cut quotas for Philippine sugar to protect its own producers. “The 1986 famine on the island of Negros in the Philippines and the sharp increase recorded in the incidence of poverty among migrant Haitian sugar workers in the Dominican Republic were direct consequences of the US quota withdrawal”.²⁶ As a 1992 NZ newspaper editorial was later to critically comment on the cynical American practice of selective trading: “The country that dumps wheat and sugar on world markets invokes anti-dumping laws if its domestic producers appear to justify a complaint that another country is subsidising their exports to the US”²⁷ – or whatever other reason it is convenient to invoke at the time. Incidentally, the US sugar agro-industry, despite a free trade agreement with Australia, is still protected from the Australian industry; and Australia is a “developed country”, a close American mate, as well as the world’s fourth largest sugar producing nation!
 
Among other accumulating adverse conditions for sugar in the decade of the 1980s, one loomed as the prime destroyer: the European Community subsidised sugar beet through “price support and consumer-financed export dumping in the 1980s”, emerging as “the world’s largest exporter”.²⁸ In addition, the US in the late 1980s further undermined the International Commodity Agreement (ICA) for sugar, helped by very low global prices. NZ was happy to collaborate with the US in stripping away any effective assistance and/or protection for poor Third World producers provided by ICAs in the lead up to the GATT Uruguay Round that ushered in the WTO. By 1990, high fructose corn syrup and other sugar substitutes, including the controversial aspartame, were substantially reducing the demand for sugar from poorer countries.²⁹ Any future cash crop export path for tropical countries like the Philippines was demonstrably fraught with probable pitfalls, let alone the displacement of vital domestic food crops.
 
Sugaring The Cash Crop Prescription Pill?
 
Harsh ironies certainly abound in the history of sugar cultivation in the Philippines. As noted above, in the early 20th Century Philippine crops like sugar, tobacco, hemp and copra were produced for the American market. Then in the early 1930s, certain American agro-industries, including sugar, tobacco and dairy, were actually motivated to support Filipino self-government because these commodities - as exported from the Philippines - no longer got easy entry to the US.³⁰ So, nominal Filipino political independence came about in 1934.
 
Even well before World War 2, the central underlying problem of food security in the Philippines and its causes, when taken in conjunction with the inequality of landholding, was already then clearly expressed, foreshadowing greater difficulties for the future. “The Philippine economy had become over-dependent on a single export crop, sugar, and on a single export market, the US. There had been no balanced development of trade or industry within the islands. The heavy concentration on commercial agriculture for export had helped to perpetuate landlordism and tenancy; it also necessitated the import of rice. The mass of Filipino people remained small farmers or agricultural labourers working on land they did not own”.³¹ So the later debacle of Negros and sugar in 1986 was all pretty predictable, especially in view of the general Western exploitation of tropical commodities. Suitably updated for the more complex and diversified present, the same sort of challenge to sustainable food security reigns in the Philippines today.
 
Economic Contradictions
 
Furthermore, many years later, when Joseph Collins of the Oakland (US)-based Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) pointed out to President Aquino “that the Philippine sugar industry’s productivity is one of the lowest in the world”, and that land reform is needed on grounds of improved efficiency, let alone for social justice and a host of other reasons, the President had no answer.³² She was clearly much too tied to her class interests anyway.
 
Significantly enough, the ongoing problem of sugar cultivation and its pitfalls, along with all its salutary lessons, was reinforced once more in the epoch of GATT/WTO-mandated liberalisation. On the cusp of the 21st Century, trade analyst John Madeley observed that: “The Government of the Philippines has faithfully implemented its commitments under the Uruguay Round. It has liberalised trade and allowed the import of more sugar, an important sector. But when imports from an efficient, low cost source suddenly started coming into a country that is an inefficient producer, it was small farmers and sugar workers of the Philippines who paid the price – over 400,000 people”.³³ Because these people were among the poorest sections of the country’s population, their food security was put at stake. This episode demonstrated yet again how free trade theory “can only be imposed on the complex world that makes up developing country agriculture at enormous human cost – in practice, at a cost to those whose food security is already at risk”.³⁴
 
The Neo-Liberal Line And Foreign Control
 
A former technocratic planner for Philippine agriculture has delivered a kind of manifesto of the dominant neo-liberal position. It can serve as a very convenient object for analysis in order to examine this doctrine and agenda in more detail. It also provides an enlightening insight into the neo-liberal mindset and political strategy. Published in early 2006 by the Singapore-based Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS) and titled “Food Security And The Threat Within: Rice Policy Reform in the Philippines”, this statement of the neo-liberal position by Bruce Tolentino is remarkable for a number of things.³⁵ Perhaps the most striking aspect is the paper’s peculiar vagueness imbued with a deep-seated and politically coded ideological perspective. If one is seeking specific details on what is exactly meant by “Rice Policy Reform”, then this paper is far from enlightening. However, one can clearly trace a quite extraordinary and bizarre theme throughout the paper: “The Threat Within” emerges to be the Filipino people themselves!
 
The IDSS is a US-backed thinktank and a Ford Foundation grant funded the paper by the American university trained Tolentino. Appropriately enough, Tolentino is currently the Director for Economic Reform at the long time US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) organisation, the Asia Foundation. As one of those studiously cultivated, American-aligned technocrats so typical of certain Third World ruling cliques, Tolentino faithfully charts his master’s policy line on agricultural “reform”.

Growing For Good?
 
In his paper, Tolentino addresses the problem of the lack of growth in Filipino agriculture. We have already reviewed a number of very important reasons for this above. What then is Tolentino’s key question? Well, first of all, it needs to be said that for Tolentino the obstacles lie in the way of effective and complete fulfilment of the free trade agenda and adaptation to globalisation, however convoluted his style of presentation. He starts off by expressing concern about the poor productivity of Philippine agriculture and the lack of proper governance during the modern era. As we have seen, the Philippines has become a regular rice importer and increasingly so – mainly from Vietnam and Thailand, and from the US for better quality rice. Yet, as Tolentino acknowledges, self-sufficiency in rice is an explicit national policy as declared in the Philippine Constitution itself.³⁶
 
For Tolentino, however, the problem of slow agricultural growth is due to the fact that the Philippine government has been unable to carry out proper agricultural reform. For him, of course, these reform aims are prescribed according to the liberalisation agenda, although ritual genuflection is of course also made to “agrarian reform”, i.e. the transfer of land ownership from large landowners to landless farmers. He sounds a note of acute frustration: “The Philippine government has been experiencing extreme difficulty in implementing the reforms it has agreed to under multilateral frameworks such as the GATT-WTO and the ASEAN AFTA” (ASEAN Free Trade Area) .³⁷ For sure, Tolentino complains about the maintenance of quantitative restrictions on rice imports for keeping “high farm gate and thereby high consumer rice prices in the country”.³⁸ Perversely, he blames these restrictions for preventing “productivity increases to support farmers’ incomes and ensure domestic food security”.³⁹
 
Corporate Economics Versus People Power
 
From the viewpoint of neo-classical economists like Tolentino and co, such high prices supposedly protect inefficient producers at high cost to societal welfare whereas cheaper imports can induce farmers to switch to more efficient methods or higher value products, thus better utilising resources. But I have recorded above various statistics and case studies showing the deleterious inroads of imports, and how governmental policies have consequently decimated small farmers and staple food producers. By 2006 when Tolentino’s paper was published, what was left of quantitative restrictions was piddling indeed; and when the wave of the 2008 global food crisis broke over the Philippines, the Government had not been guaranteeing rice prices for quite some time. It had phased out any intervention in the market other than for purchasing less than a token 1% of domestic rice, an amount first initiated in 1994 during the finalisation of the GATT Uruguay Round and the institution of the WTO. It was soon regularly buying proportionately more imported rice.⁴⁰
 
Professor Walden Bello has identified the neo-classical economic doctrinal diagnosis in the following terms: “Not agricultural protectionism but problems relating to ‘a weak technology base, price distortions, weak property rights structure, constraints on land market operations, insufficient support services, and poor governance,’” have been alleged as the main bottlenecks to greater agricultural productivity.⁴¹)The lead author of this 2001 study cited by Bello was Tolentino. Bello observed that: “Though they could not spell out the problem owing to the anti-State bias of their ideology, what these economists were, in effect, saying was that it was the lack of effective, comprehensive, and coordinated Government intervention in agriculture that lay at the root of the anaemic state of Philippine agriculture”.⁴² This governmental failure was spelt out more clearly and at some length in Tolentino’s 2006 paper. The great irony in the latter instance is that Tolentino sees the Philippine government as failing to facilitate a globalist market takeover as dictated by the US and other trade partners. Failure lies then in the Government’s inability to fully facilitate privatisation, TNC and corporate rule – in a word, total foreign control.
 
Facilitating Foreign Control
 
The Philippines is a country where the US has used a very wide spectrum of means to shape the structure and functioning of society to its own ends. USAID has been central to the designs of Filipino agricultural policy, from opening up the rice and corn markets for Cargill and co to formulating and prescribing intellectual property law adapted for predatory TNC “biopiracy”. In 1990, the Philippines was the first ASEAN country to implement a biotechnology regulatory regime, similarly geared to TNC demands. Cargill, by the way, openly and brazenly attacked the principle of self-sufficiency in its lobbying to demolish the Magna Carta for Small Farmers on the entry into force of the WTO.⁴³ The US backed up its TNCs with the threat of trade sanctions.
 
As part of trade liberalisation, the Government programme put emphasis on restructuring the National Food Authority (NFA), a parastatal* organisation charged with managing and regulating the food markets. It is the specific Government agency that is responsible for buying both domestic and foreign rice, such purchasing previously mentioned in connection with the settlement of the GATT Uruguay Round. USAID has been financing an assessment of the NFA and how to restructure the organisation, as well as looking at food subsidies targeted at the poor.⁴⁴ But funding from the Asia Development Bank (ADB) for what was called the Grains Sector Development Programme (GSDP) came unstuck in late 2003 with the Government getting bogged down in politically rung changes. ADB conditionalities have been significant in opening up the rice market. *Parastatal – an official organisation which indirectly serves the State. Ed.
 
People Power Stuffs Up The Market!
 
In Tolentino’s view, the advent of the Arroyo government meant key aspects of the programme lapsed under growing “populist and short-term positions on rice sector reforms. This is due to the fact that many have come into office on the back of ‘people-powered’ agendas that have promised much to the population”.⁴⁵ So it is a real “bugger” of a situation for Tolentino and co – democracy, or at least what we have got of it in the Philippines - has got in the way! Even the Rightwing and repressive Arroyo Administration has had to give some ground on certain issues to popular concerns.

Tolentino laments that the proposed agricultural reforms remain in limbo and points to the “few farmers” and others he alleges are behind the visible resistance. Interestingly, these few people are all closely associated with the operation of the NFA, comprising those farmers who benefit from its operations, the NFA Employees’ Association who fear privatisation, and some businessmen who work the NFA to their advantage. This is all obviously self-serving stuff pitched to Tolentino’s anticipated audience. The opposition to liberalisation in the Philippines has been deep, widespread, and hopefully growing for the future. Indeed, Tolentino contradicts himself by his angst-wrung recognition of this very fact as we have just noted above!
 
Surprisingly enough, Tolentino even recognises that the role of the NFA is “praiseworthy” in buying high from farmers, selling low to consumers, and storing long to stabilise prices.⁴⁶ But he asserts that the NFA’s “performance over the past three decades shows that its mission has been impossible to successfully achieve”.⁴⁷ The obvious basic reason is that increasing imports have undermined the NFA’s role, a fact so very selectively ignored by Tolentino who prescribes the destructive cause as part of the positive solution. This is not to ignore in turn other possible problems with the operation of the NFA. But the goal here should surely be to improve the working of this parastatal to better benefit small farmers in general, and so help effect proper national food sovereignty. I have already described its increasing ineffectiveness in the free trade era.
 
Manufacturing More Market-Driven Pseudo Democracy
 
Tolentino says that those hampering the implementation of free market reform “are far more focused than the interests of all consumers and taxpayers who pay for the costs of the rice price distortions”, echoing here standard neo-liberal rhetoric .⁴⁸ In light of the situation I have portrayed, this gives some idea of the totalitarian market blitzkrieg planned for Filipino agriculture by the free marketeers. As a frustrated, foreign control-oriented technocrat, Tolentino reads the riot act for the Philippines in his article. Since he sees liberalisation of the rice trade as “inevitable” given globalisation, he calls upon the ruling elite and their foreign backers to deal to the popular movement for food sovereignty by steadfastly acting on the reforms. In association with its trade/foreign investment partners, the Philippine government should stabilise its bureaucracy and carry out a consistent policy and programme of liberalisation. The management of agriculture has unfortunately become “exces-sively politicised” for Tolentino and his mates. The media is a source of marked irritation for him, with its “selective lens” making issues “political and prone to short-sighted assessment”. He is similarly aggrieved that “public input” is a feature of Filipino society. As he bitterly says, the fact that “rice is a political commodity” has now to be recognised. But for Tolentino this means “intensive and continuing” advocacy to roll back the food sovereignty movement, using skilfully deployed “political management” to drive through the reform programme.⁴⁹
 
“Rice Is A Political Commodity”
 
Using “social science” jargon characteristic of the so-called Copenhagen School, Tolentino refers to the “securitisation” of food, “securitisation” amounting to a fancy way of saying that food security in the Philippines has been given extraordinary status in the sense of somehow being put beyond politics. In other words, it has become a socially sacrosanct principle. But in the human world nothing is beyond politics! And so Tolentino wants the “de-securitisation” of this principle. In his words: “Moderation of the politics over food will help shift the issue away from a contest between parties over resources to a more tractable issue of bureaucratic management”.⁵⁰ It is highly significant here that Tolentino refers to “the realities of limited domestic resources, increasing domestic demands and globalisation”.⁵¹ So the people are to be even further deprived by free trade. Yet even Tolentino acknowledges facts like “the substantial potentials of improved productivity as yet unexploited”, and that a lot of agricultural sector monies were siphoned off as “compensation payments for landowners affected by land reform” (i.e. likely corrupt use of funds for ineffectual “land reform”).

Tolentino’s argument takes an openly nasty turn with regard with the NFA. He is heartened by research showing “reforms that reduce food subsidies are successful in the context of fiscal crises”.⁵² While it was still possible to channel the fiscal burden of the food price subsidies through the NFA, the parastatal has had to borrow from banks for this and had become indebted. With the 2008 food crisis and growing imports, coupled with the global downturn, the NFA’s position has severely worsened. So the vultures are circling!
 
Free Trade Injustices
 
Despite so many years of free trade enculturation, some Filipino politicians and officials have been acutely aware of the injustices heaped on their country. For example, in 1998, Philippines Secretary of Trade and Industry, Cesar Bautista, was complaining about the very unequal burden of adjustment in the AoA with developed countries still maintaining “high levels of domestic support and export subsidies”, to the comparative disadvantage of the developing countries.⁵³ The same year, development analyst Eduardo Galeano remarked that: “The average rural producer in the US receives State subsidies 100 times greater than the income of a farmer in the Philippines, according to UN figures”.⁵⁴ It is surely an upside down world!
 
Hunger surveys like the Social Weather Stations’ surveys have long demonstrated the disturbing extent and depth of malnutrition and hunger throughout the Philippines. Meantime, the national food import bill has increased hugely. From 1993 to 2003, a period fulfilling AoA obligations - and often exceeding legal requirements – this import bill had already rocketed from $US714 million to $US2.38 billion.⁵⁵ The Philippines is supposedly targeting 98% self-sufficiency in rice by 2010.But the Government’s real emphasis is expressed by House Speaker Prospero Nograles who in calling for food self-sufficiency said that: “The Government should encourage the private sector to build partnerships with farmers and engage in corporate farming”.⁵⁶ Nograles made it clear that the high-tech, fossil-fuelled industrial model of agriculture was most desirable, with the “participation of corporations”, bringing “modern production technology, access to capital, direct access to domestic and foreign markets, and professional managerial expertise”.⁵⁷
 
Food Fight: The Scramble For Resources
 
Exemplifying all this was the news in June 2009 that the Gulf States, e.g. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are planning farm projects in the Philippines.⁵⁸ The global battle over resources is now reaching new heights of obscenity with rich countries and their TNCs seeking to grab food sources and the best lands across the planet.⁵⁹ The proposed Filipino farms will comprise a critical component in a wider economic “partnership” being forged between the Arroyo government and the Gulf States. Globalisation has meant the intimate joint operation of elitist interests against poor people everywhere. Ironically, the oil rich Gulf States are facing problems of rising populations, slow agricultural growth, and increases in the prices of imported foodstuffs – just as the case in the Philippines.
 
Meantime, work and employment, socio-economic, and environmental conditions for exporting to affluent consumers are often rapidly deteriorating. For instance, a report by the International Labour Rights Forum (ILRF), released in late October 2008, found that the costs of the global pineapple industry have been increasing for workers and their communities. The report “shows how global food corporations fail to respect human rights, public health, and the environment in their supply chains”.⁶⁰ In two of the largest pineapple exporting nations, the Philippines and Costa Rica, workers and those dependent on their employment have been experiencing the further erosion of wages and social benefits even as the pineapple companies have increased their profits. The TNCs concerned, Del Monte and Dole, compete as the world’s biggest exporters of fresh and processed pineapples but their oligopolistic regime means greater hardship for their labour forces, including the heavy human price of pesticide poisonings.

Exports And Market Mayhem
 
Certain difficulties and costs of cash crop exporting in the Philippines have already been described and illustrated in some detail, along with a number of examples. So often, new ventures, supposedly intended to help earn the vital foreign exchange necessary for greater quantities of cheaper food imports, among other alleged welfare gains, have floundered badly due to a host of unfavourable conditions. For example, as indicated in the case of specialist vegetables and other products like pork and poultry, imports have been instrumental in undermining prospects. But there are many other obstacles too. Small farmers are very disadvantaged by the requirements for what are called “high value non-traditional export crops” (NTAEs).⁶¹ They need special technological and marketing expertise; “expensive inputs that are imported”; and other resources and facilities only available to larger farmers. The economics of scale work against them: they have to cope with huge price fluctuations; high quality standards; high rents; difficulties in getting credit; and lack of bargaining power.⁶² Prawns were cultivated during the 1980s as a kind of NTAE and were actually “the fastest growing Philippine export” during this period.⁶³ However, this export enterprise plagued some rice farmers with saltwater seepage into their lands, as well leading to fresh water shortages. Like most cash cropping, prawn cultivation increased socio-economic inequalities.
 
Besides the challenges of NTAEs, other supposed options have proved frustrating, and at worst, devastating. In certain areas, it was hoped that out of work corn farmers would take up the substitute of growing silage for cattle production yet this proved unrewarding. As was illustrated with some NTAEs, imports have also undermined this enterprise. Imported beef mandated under the AoA depressed the local market for silage.⁶⁴ So these former small corn farmers received a “double whammy”!
 
Meat And Dairy: Way To Go!?
 
Meat and dairy farming are problematic in many ways for the Philippines and other tropical countries. One of the significant driving forces behind the increase in grain prices in recent years is the taste of the new upper and middle classes in China and India and elsewhere for meat. As a consequence, grain gets diverted from meeting the needs of poor people in order to feed affluent consumption. In the current (and future!) global context, “eating meat is an incredibly inefficient way to feed oneself. It takes up to five times more grain to get the equivalent amount of calories from eating pork as from simply eating grain itself – ten times if we’re talking about grain fattened US beef. As more grain has been diverted to livestock and to the production of biofuels for cars, annual worldwide consumption of grain has risen from 815 million metric tons in 1960 to 2.16 billion in 2008”.⁶⁵ Switching Filipino farmers from corn to assisting beef production makes absolutely no sense at all given the precarious conditions of the nation’s food security. Yet this was part of the Philippine government rationale for liberalisation! In terms of the criteria for sustainable agriculture, it represents the height of the Western free trade stupidity forced on the Philippines.
 
Dairy farmers have been adversely affected by imports too and the industry there has called for higher tariffs. But, again, the question arises as to whether in this particular instance too it is much better strategy to concentrate resources on essential primary production. To date, dairying in the Philippines is only a small industry. Back in 1993, before the finalisation of the GATT Uruguay Round, Australia was concerned for its skim milk market in the Philippines. It was annoyed about the competition from American subsidised dairy exports with the US in turn complaining about similar EU exports. Only about 6% of milk consumed in the Philippines is now produced locally with the rest being mostly imported from the US, Australia and NZ. The exporting countries are clearly very well established. At the same time, the small local industry has been growing over the last few years.
 
Creaming It?
 
Trade analyst John Madeley has outlined some of the issues at stake over Philippine dairy in connection with the decision back in 1986 by the Filipino government’s Ministry of Agriculture to suspend “support for the country’s smallholder dairy farmers in favour of imported dairy products . . . In the Filipino case there were losers and gainers . . .”.⁶⁶ Considerations still relevant today involve the possible future lack of foreign exchange for dairy imports, and the exact nature of the outcome for the local industry and the people involved. In 1986: “The Filipino government’s action stimulated a number of local cooperatives to compete with the imported milk”.⁶⁷ By the inauguration of the new ASEAN-Australian-NZ Free Trade Area (AANZFTA) in February 2009, dairy issues had reached yet another level of consideration and concern.
 
During the negotiations leading up to AANZFTA, the NZ government had signalled that “sticking areas into some of the ASEAN countries included dairy and meat access”, besides certain other matters.⁶⁸ In the final phase of the negotiations, the Philippines pushed for Australia and NZ to help the development of the local dairy industry in exchange for total tariff cuts on relevant products.⁶⁹ This sort of development would apply the “dairy zone” concept, similar to an arrangement in an Asian Development Bank-mediated deal with Japan on sugar. Dairy was the main obstacle to finalising the Free Trade Agreement. Fonterra is already involved in several joint ventures in the Philippines. Along with companies like Kraft and Nestlé, such TNCs dominate the industry, which traditionally has consisted mostly of small farmers.⁷⁰
 
Taking stock overall, priorities should be directed at better regulation of the larger commercial operations, including processing where Nestlé’s union bashing* has long been of concern, among other issues; and the allocation of resources and energy to grain production for domestic needs rather than any increased production of meat and dairy. This should be the bottom line for food security in the treatment of the meat and dairy sector in terms of general policy. *See Luke Coxon’s article “There’s Blood In Your Coffee”, elsewhere in this issue, for details. Ed.
 
Regional Integration, And Food Security
 
Given the problems of implementing global free trade measures, bilateral and regional free trade agreements have become increasingly the means for the TNC-driven agenda to liberalise agricultural exports and imports. Regional agreements could actually be very fruitful if the principles of truly sustainable development were adopted, with ecological economics and social justice to the fore. To the contrary, conventional capitalist goals and criteria are prevalent throughout South East Asia, fostering and magnifying the conditions of malnutrition and hunger. Furthermore, this is happening in a region under a rapidly mounting attack on its marvellously rich biodiversity: “growing industrialisation of agriculture across South East Asia is encouraging deforestation and threatening wildlife, including the Asian elephant and tiger . . . Many South East Asian countries have expressed a commitment to controlling deforestation and protecting wildlife, but economic development is contributing to environmental stress in the region”.⁷¹ So there has been very little substantive progress, even though on the official plane some positive sounding rhetoric has picked up. It will take concerted NGO efforts at the local, regional, and international levels for positive results to materialise.
 
Yet the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) was broadcasting at the very time of the GATT Uruguay Round settlement and the WTO’s imminent free trade surge, that Asia as a whole was facing a severe food shortage in the future.⁷² In particular, the destruction of agricultural systems due to overfishing and deforestation could eventually induce food shortages as population continues to climb. The FAO called for an emphasis on food security as the demand for rice was projected to rise steeply by 2020, given both upward population and income trends. In 2009, income trends might be falling into question but the identified problems are more intense than ever with the juggernaut of corporate free trade grinding out alternative paths to sustainable agriculture in the ensuing world scramble for resources, and attempts to generate economic growth.
 
However, of late, the whole free trade juggernaut has got pretty shaky with globalisation running off the rails somewhat. The assumptions and expectations of Bruce Tolentino and co are under mounting siege. Indeed, globalisation is in crisis as we enter a new world era. Food security or food sovereignty must be moved to the fore more than ever before. But, meantime, regional and bilateral pressures have been pushing hard further down on agricultural production for domestic needs. Besides WTO-imposed conditions, the Philippines has been obliged to cut tariffs in accordance with the common effective preferential tariff scheme under the ASEAN FTA.

Integrating Food Insecurity?
 
In March 2009, ASEAN adopted a statement on a framework and strategic plan of action for food security. This food policy includes rice, maize (corn), soybean, sugar and cassava. Some measures sound very good such as scaling up “community-based food security initiatives”, and even the promotion of “sustainable food production”.⁷³ Other measures include the long term provision for an emergency rice reserve; greater investment in agriculture; optimisation of land use and other natural resources; greater support for “small-scale farmers; and the development of cooperatives and farmers’ organisations”. A critical point, however, concerns the promotion of “sustainable food trade”.
 
A very percipient analyst, Aekapol Chongvilaivan, a fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies, like the IDSS also Singapore-based, has a starkly contrasting view to that of Tolentino. He is highly critical of the effects of regional free trade on food security.⁷⁴ He asserts that the challenge of overcoming hunger is “currently underplayed by the member countries”.⁷⁵ The role of rice is critical. He cites a joint study by the FAO and the World Bank which showed that smallholders account for more than 80% of the agricultural population, but were “unlikely to survive the aggressive wave of globalisation” (or we might ad its bilateral/regional versions).⁷⁶ Chongvilaivan goes on to make a series of important observations.

Increasing Instability Of Food Production
 
Like some other critics, Chongvilaivan condemns ASEAN’s strengthening economic integration and the lowering of intra-regional trade barriers as one reason for severe susceptibility to food-price turbulence, given that poor people and the agricultural sector in general are “highly sensitive to tariff elimination”.⁷⁷ A lot of arable land is being virtually wiped out for domestic food production. Problems like “a rapidly growing population, energy price shocks, biofuel stampedes, global warming and climate change” can loom menacingly. Tariff reduction can thus be “enormously perilous”, as demonstrated by “the recurring food turmoil”. He says that: “The Philippines’ unceasing food shortages illustrate how globalisation as the basis of ASEAN’s economic linkages has turned a self-sufficient, rice-producing country into the world’s largest rice-importing one”.⁷⁸

As both Chongvilaivan and Tolentino note, ASEAN countries like Vietnam and Thailand, another Cairns Group member, and also the US as an external exporter, have been making deep inroads into the Filipino rice market.⁷⁹ But they differ radically in their analysis and advocacy. For Tolentino, in the long run, it all represents a rational allocation of resources whereas for Chongvilaivan: “With the drive towards a free trade area in South East Asia, cheaper rice from Thailand and Vietnam has crowded out resources allocated for rice production and ultimately made the Philippines highly dependent on rice imports. Undoubtedly, the increases in rice prices in mid 2008 propelled millions of the poor in the Philippines into malnutrition”.⁸⁰ The ASEAN countries are achieving free trade at the expense of food security.
 
“Biofuel Stampedes”, Etc.
 
Currently, there is a free trade “biofuel stampede” in South East Asia, as in other parts of the Third World, and this is squeezing out resources for domestic food production in the Philippines too. The rich few are enjoying a feeding frenzy in their latest phase of plundering the planet. “The trend is towards importing feedstocks from other countries, including Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines”.⁸¹ Efficiency in the use of resources as measured by conventional economic criteria is often pretty meaningless, as well as simply destructive. For instance, the two Cairns Group members, Malaysia and the Philippines, have been seen as “highly competitive edible oils exporters” while “the majority of [their] rural staple producers face extreme poverty”, even though production of these edible oils exacts costs not priced by the market, i.e. so called “externalities”.⁸²
 
The ASEAN food security policy has a provision protecting countries against any adverse effects from biofuels, yet this is already being ignored with the “market” responding to “efficiency” as dictated by wealthy governments and consumers. It is the same sort of syndrome as with edible oils, the worst such edible oil crop being palm oil and its overlap with biofuel manufacture. Palm oil is increasingly a vegetable source for diesel fuel, continuing to slash swathes of tropical forest worldwide. Already, Malaysia - “the largest producer of palm oil in the world - is plagued with what is now aptly called the “diesel of deforestation”, having lost a staggering 87% of its forests.⁸³ Like the Philippines, its natural resources have been savagely plundered.
 
Enter JPEPA!
 
Meanwhile, a new trade and investment agreement with a major partner, Japan, is directed at even greater exploitation of the Filipino people, lands, and their general environment. De facto direct foreign control of fertile lands is already widespread throughout the Philippines. For instance, Dole and Del Monte have converted some 200,000 hectares of lands in southern Mindanao into banana and pineapple plantations. These TNCs enjoy the sham of leasing land from a compliant government agency. Now millions of hectares are threatened by the recently concluded Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA). As earlier intimated, more sugar cultivation is a large component of this deal. Ironically too, sugar is designated one of ASEAN’s food security crops. Yet to date, sugar - a sweetener and in the modern era also a biofuel - has possibly been the prime cash crop offender when the total human and ecological costs are fully taken into account. The accounting of these costs should reach back deep into the colonial past, as well as the present and, evidently, future.⁸⁴
 
Rural and groups and various NGOs are strongly contesting the JPEPA as yet another vehicle of foreign control. In the words of one commentator, Philip Nemenzo, Japan has strict standards when it comes to consumer food quality “and the touted benefit to the small farmer, fisherman or food processor is a myth. It will be the rich multinational corporations with their stringent production guidelines and strict quality control who will reap the benefits”.⁸⁵ There are big fears, among other concerns, about Japan ruining what exists of Filipino industry, and also dumping toxic waste from Japan itself. JPEPA is better called the Japan-Philippines Economic Exploitation Agreement!
 
Japan has been the leading offender in the Asian region on logging forests. Ever since 1945 Japanese TNCs have ravaged the Philippines for timber. Like Malaysia, the Philippines has suffered the destruction of most of its forest cover, and consequently has “one of the most severe deforestation problems of any developing country” with resulting floods and other ecological damage.⁸⁶ Japan has been undermining the Philippines in other ways as well, such as exerting “market forces” to get the Filipino government to liberalise entry for rice imports, while hypocritically protecting its own domestic rice market. The big boys play trade and investment rules very rough and tough.
 
More External Threats
 
The Philippines is looking to a Free Trade Agreement with the US, a move which would tighten the ties that already bind to the point of strangulation, including more weakening of the anaemic food security provisions. More specifically articulated and legally prescribed free trade and investment conditions would only cement foreign control. No doubt this would suit the majority of the Filipino ruling class as exemplified by Tolentino’s definition of the agricultural situation.
 
Ironically, however, in his paper on “Food Security and the Threat Within, Tolentino even openly acknowledges one of the main ways that the US has exploited the Philippines.⁸⁷ Tolentino points out how a significant quantity of the food supplies imported by the Philippines has been sourced under the US’ Public Law (PL) 480 programme. “Commodity sales under PL480 programmes are partly a mechanism for export of surpluses produced by US farmers. These are also partly instruments of US foreign policy, since access to these foods at the seemingly concessional terms that these are provided, comes with conditions that implement the US’ foreign policy, or its vision of development for the country receiving the commodities”.⁸⁸
 
In a footnote, Tolentino expands on this point: seemingly concessional “because when the full, effective real price or cost of the PL480 commodity imports are worked out, these turn out to be even more expensive than those sourced from other exporting countries. The US commodity sales are also tied to specific US-based shipping and payment arrangements and other tie-in conditions”.⁸⁹ PL480 has been employed for many years in fostering commercial markets for American grain and other agricultural sales and has proved enormously successful. Development analyst and food systems expert Susan George described the international scene thus in 1976: “Food aid is a means for developing markets, for helping agribusiness, for gaining a stranglehold on the policy decisions of needy governments and for promoting US foreign policy and military goals. It is also intimately tied to the overall US agricultural policy”.⁹⁰
 
The Militarised Market Mess On Mindanao
 
If Negros and the sugar debacle of 1986 so dramatically demonstrated the pitfalls of free trade and commodity cash cropping, then the current case of the island of Mindanao and all its horrendous problems, so much due to American neo-colonialism, reinforces all the lessons on a horrendous scale. In Mindanao, the trade imperialism of the US goes hand in hand today with the so-called “War on Terror”.⁹¹ In 2009, an American backed military assault by Philippine government forces has caused a lot more misery. The “offensive and the refugee problem have further pushed back prospects of peace in the oil and gas-rich marshlands of central Mindanao, leaving it mired in poverty”.⁹² Mindanao has one of the worst internal refugee problems in the world. The Filipino government is again engaged in suppression of the Muslim Moro people. A key governmental aim is to try and crush resistance to more foreign investment, i.e. to more foreign and Filipino elitist exploitation of the island.
 
For Mindanao, the 21st Century has so far been brutal. “Mindanao is the poorest island” with hunger and malnutrition rampant despite being “blessed with vast food and agricultural resources . . . The problem can be rooted to the long-term marginalisation of Mindanao in national development policy . . . Access to land is the worst in the region . . . Mindanao illustrates the worst of the Philippine government’s blind adherence to liberalisation and non-independent security policies”.⁹³ Real wages have undergone the biggest fall in the country. Corn farmers have been decimated there. One researcher found, on a trip to Bukidnon province in 1996, that “the southern part of the province is steadily being converted from corn to sugar”.⁹⁴ Conditions have only got worse for local peasant food producers. Despite the mid 1980s’ sugar debacle in Negros and the subsequent steep decline in output, sugar has been making a marked comeback in the Philippines.
 
Food Costs
 
Production of bananas, pineapples, coconut oil, rubber, coffee, and similar commodities, along with mining, logging, hydro-electric dams, and other enterprises, have often proved very harmful to both people and land. The indigenous inhabitants and minority groups have suffered the ruthless intrusion of foreign TNCs typified by the pineapple and banana operations of Del Monte and Dole. For instance, in 1976 it was reported that in the Bukidnon region of Mindanao, Del Monte was “attempting to coerce self-provisioning smallholders to lease their land to the company”.⁹⁵ Methods of coercion included “armed company agents”, fencing off areas, and driving cattle onto the cultivated fields of those who refused to lease land. Later, the company’s aerial spraying caused severe harm to humans and animals. By the mid 1980s, almost 100 major agribusiness corporations had fruit and rubber plantations and corporate farms on the island – all “orientated towards the export market” – and deeply embedded “in Mindanao’s ancestral lands”.⁹⁶
 
The use of dangerous pesticides on TNC plantations was highlighted by an incident in June 2008 when a capsized passenger ferry was found to be carrying endosulfan for a Del Monte pineapple plantation in Bukidnon province. “The discovery of the toxic cargo was a grim reminder of how safety standards are flouted in the Philippines”.⁹⁷ This applies both to ferry transport operations and plantation practices! Incidentally, the supposedly restricted use of endosulfan has been controversial in NZ, and has even caused problems for beef exports to South Korea and Taiwan. It is banned in more than 50 countries.⁹⁸ As for Del Monte, the company has a grim record as already noted a couple of times in this article. In a previous instance, Del Monte was exposed importing and using a banned pesticide, heptachlor, for pineapple production in Kenya.
 
Contesting The Destruction Of Food Supplies
 
Mindanao, like some other regions of the Philippines, is subject in the 21st Century to expansion of the latest trendy agro/biofuel crop, jatropha. As in Brazil and now elsewhere, jatropha is grown in the Philippines for making bio-diesel fuels. President Arroyo has personally pushed the planting of jatropha. In June 2006, she “ordered the Department of Energy to widen the propagation of jatropha plants not only in military camps but in all available lands. The President had earlier ordered the conversion of idle lands in military camps into plantations for jatropha”.⁹⁹ Cars are to come before people for the Filipino ruling class! Air NZ is seeking to use jatropha-sourced biofuel from the tropics for its planes.

At the same time, resistance to such depredations is spreading and deepening among the peoples of the Philippines. As one example of people power and NGO action, we can note the movement against mining, or at least large-scale mining. In an article in Kapatiran 29/30 (May 2008, “Digging Disaster: OceanaGold’s Didipio Project”, http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/Kapatiran/KapNo29n30/Kapart29n30/art134.htm) I described the increasingly successful campaign against the activities of NZ-linked company OceanaGold in Didipio.¹⁰⁰ There are many such campaigns across the Philippines with the Catholic Church even getting blamed for slowing the “progress of mining”! Often these campaigns are partly driven by the cause of food sovereignty. Besides the mounting resistance to OceanaGold’s operation, to take just one other example, we can look to the campaign to assist the indigenous Subanon people against the Canadian miner TVIPacific and its Philippine subsidiary in Zamboanga del Norte on Mindanao.¹⁰¹ Just as with OceanaGold’s mining incursions, there have been threats to farming, tribal ancestral lands, waterways, and the rest of the local ecology. Since 1995, the TNC had been getting gold by appropriating mining tailings from local smallscale miners.
 
Worldwide, the movement for food sovereignty everywhere is growing strongly in face of TNC predation. The angst of Bruce Tolentino expresses some of the frustration of exploitative elites as this movement confronts the vested interests currently in control of the international production and distribution of food. The hidden battle for the world food system is coming out into the open.¹⁰² “The International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty in a statement to the FAO Food Summit in 2008 has declared a People’s State of Emergency to fully respond to the crisis”, and for measures to curb the powers of the TNCs.¹⁰³ Among other things, this manifesto calls for a “moratorium on expansion of large scale industrial agrofuel production”; the rejection of “neoliberal trade and aid policies”; and the rejection of “the Green Revolution models” and “technocratic techno-fixes”. Instead, it appeals for “an inclusive strategy for conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity that prioritizes the participation of small scale farmers, pastoralists and fisherfolk”.¹⁰⁴
 
Fighting For Food Sovereignty And The Future
 
If Filipinos are ever to achieve food sovereignty they will surely need greater international support and solidarity in this most vital struggle; and because their experience mirrors that of so many others throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, this then must be a call to arms to fight for food security and sustainable agriculture worldwide and for perpetuity.
 


References & Notes

¹ Bourne, Joel (June 2009) “The End of Plenty – Special Report: The Global Food Crisis”, National Geographic, pp26-59, quotes on p40.
² Kolko, Gabriel (1988) “Confronting the Third World: US Foreign Policy 1945-1980, Pantheon Books, p173.
³ ibid., p26.
⁴ ibid.
⁵ Spicer, John (2006) “Bio-diversity: A Beginner’s Guide”, Oneworld Pubs, see pp2 & 109.
⁶ “Rigby’s Atlas of Earth Resources” (1979) Rigby Ltd, pp134/5.
⁷ Asia Link (May/April, 1988) vol. X, no.2, Centre for the Progress of Peoples: from a speech by Rodriguez, originally printed in early 1987.
⁸ ibid.
⁹ ibid.
¹⁰ Watkins, Kevin (1992) “Fixing the Rules: North-South Issues in International Trade and the GATT Uruguay Round”, Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), p65.
¹¹ Focus on Trade (Dec. 2000) no.57, op. cit, p38.
¹² ibid.
¹³ ibid, p31.
¹⁴ Bello, Walden (20/6/2003) “Mul-tilateral Punishment: The Philippines in the WTO, 1995-2003”, Stop the New Round Coalition! & Focus on the Global South, p3.
¹⁵ ibid.
¹⁶ “Directory of TNCs in the Philippines” (1988) TNC Special Project Staff, IBON Databank, p22.
¹⁷ “Proclaim Jubilee: Land and Poverty” (1986/88) CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) Education Campaign, p19.
¹⁸ ibid, p16; a United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report found that the area devoted to farming increased from 1971 to 1991 but decreased towards 2002: see Moog, FA. (2005) “Philippines” in Country Pasture/Forage Resource Profiles series: www.fao.org/ag/aGp/agpc/doc/Counprof/Philippines/Philipp. htm
¹⁹ Pineda-Ofreneo, Rosalinda (1991) “The Philippines: Debt and Poverty”, Oxfam, p41.
²⁰ "Just Food” (1984/5) CAFOD Education Campaign, p35.
²¹ Bourne, Joel (June 2009) op. cit. This article recognises the issue of ecology but its largely neo-Malthusian approach mostly ignores the issue of equity.
²² Siebert, Rudiger (July/August, 1997) D+C: Development and Co-operation, no.4,”Farmer Shrewdness and Expert Knowledge: Organic Farming in the Philippines”, pp22-24; “Just Food”, op, cit: Filipino traditional rice varieties can have a lot to offer, p33.
²³ “Proclaim Jubilee”, op. cit, p21.
²⁴ Todaro, Michael (1994) “Economic Development”, 5th Ed., Longman, pp560/61.
²⁵ “Sugar” (1988) Centre for World Development Education Sheet, CWDE Commodity Sheet, no.11.
²⁶ Watkins, Kevin (1992), op. cit, pp61/2.
²⁷ Nelson Evening Mail (6/1/92).
²⁸ Watkins, Kevin (1992), op. cit, p61.
²⁹ Bernstein, Henry, et al (1990) “The Food Question: Profits Versus People?”, Earthscan Pubs, p170. Matthew, Helen [ed.] (1963) “Asia in the Modern World”, Mentor Books, p245.
³⁰ Matthew, Helen [ed.] (1963) “Asia in the Modern World”, Mentor Books, p245
³¹ ibid.
³² “The Roots of Hunger: Power and Politics in the Philippines – An Interview with Joseph Collins” (October 1989) Multinational Monitor, pp17-20, quote on p19.
³³ Madeley, John (2000) “Hungry For Trade: How the Poor Pay for Free Trade”, Zed Books/Pluto Press, p78.
³⁴ ibid.
³⁵ Tolentino, Bruce (Jan. 2006) “Food Security and the Threat Within: Rice Policy Reform in the Philippines”, Institute of Defence & Strategic Studies (IDSS), Singapore: www.rsis.edu.sg/publicati ons/WorkingPapers/WP97.pdf
³⁶ ibid, p2.
³⁷ ibid, p6.
³⁸ ibid.
³⁹ ibid.
⁴⁰ Focus on the Global South (12/5/08): www.focusweb.org/food-crisis-symptom-of-dubious-liberalisation.html
⁴¹ Bello, Walden (20/6/2003) op. cit, pp12/13.
⁴² ibid, p13.
⁴³ Suppan, Steve (Sept. 1996) “Rice, Trade and Biotechnology in the Philippines”, Food Security Fact Sheet, no.5: www.chinaobservatory.org/library.cfm?refID=23722; for the US’ influence on the Philippine biotechnology regime see also: Bello, Walden (20/6/2003) ibid, p7.
⁴⁴ Tolentino, Bruce (Jan. 2006) op. cit, p8.
⁴⁵ ibid, p9
⁴⁶ ibid, p6.
⁴⁷ ibid.
⁴⁸ ibid, p9.
⁴⁹ ibid, pp18/19.
⁵⁰ ibid, p20.
⁵¹ ibid.
⁵² ibid, p19.
⁵³ Focus on Trade (August 1998), no.28.
⁵⁴ Pilger, John, [ed.] (2004) “Tell Me No Lies”, Jonathan Cape, p396.
⁵⁵ Focus on the Global South (12/10/04): www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/hunger/economy/2004/1012philippines.htm
⁵⁶ The Sunday Times [Manila] (6/4/08).
⁵⁷ ibid.
⁵⁸ www.business24-7.ae/Articles/2009/6/Pages/21062009/06222009_c4f27f19e7704a4db33792265e95cb2c.aspx
⁵⁹ www.grain.org/briefings/?id=212
⁶⁰ www.foodsystemsnyc.org/node/375
⁶¹ Bello, Walden (20/6/2003) op. cit, p13; Focus on Trade (Dec. 2000), op. cit.
⁶² Focus on Trade, ibid.
⁶³ Broad, Robin, et al (7/5/1990) “Rekindling the Development Debate”, working draft, pp10/11; prawn and shrimp farming has had a similarly damaging environmental impact in other Asian countries, e.g. Bangladesh – see Murphy, Sophia (1999) “Trade and Food Security: An Assessment of the Uruguay Round on Agriculture”, Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), p31.
⁶⁴ Bello, Walden (20/6/2003) op. cit, p11.
⁶⁵ Bourne, Joel (June 2009) op. cit, p41.
⁶⁶ Madeley, John (1996) “Trade and the Poor”, Intermediate Technology Publications Ltd, p22.
⁶⁷ ibid.
⁶⁸ The Press (28/8/07).
⁶⁹ Manila Bulletin (17/8/08): www.bilaterals.org/article.php3?id_article=12958
⁷⁰ Moog, F.A. (2005) op. cit.
⁷¹ Von Ruhland, Catherine (2008) “Living with the Planet: Making a Difference in a Time of Climate Change”, Lion Hudson, pp76-77.
⁷² Food Safety Week (18/10/1994) vol. 2, no. 20.
⁷³ www.aseansec.org/22210.htm
⁷⁴ Chongvilaivan, Aekapol (7/01/09) “ASEAN free trade magnifies hunger problem”, Bangkok Post. www.bangkokpost.com/business/economics/9274/asean-free-trade-magnifies-hunger-problem
⁷⁵ ibid.
⁷⁶ ibid.
⁷⁷ ibid.
⁷⁸ ibid.
⁷⁹ ibid, Tolentino, Bruce (Jan. 2006) op. cit, pp4 & 14.
⁸⁰ ibid.
⁸¹ Pacific Ecologist (Summer 2009): “Full Tanks – Empty Stomachs: Bio/agro-fuels devastate 3rd world countries for 1st world’s cars”, no. 17, p39.
⁸² Food Matters Worldwide (March 1990) no. 5, p19.
⁸³ Pacific Ecologist (Summer 2009) op. cit, p9; see also pp21 & 36-39.
⁸⁴ ibid, see various articles; see also e.g. Macinnis, Peter (2002) “Bittersweet: The Story of Sugar”, Allen & Unwin.
⁸⁵ www.philippinestoday.net/index.php?module=article%8573
⁸⁶ Madeley, John (1999) “Big Business, Poor Peoples”, Zed Books, p72.
⁸⁷ Tolentino, Bruce (Jan. 2006) op. cit.
⁸⁸ ibid, p3.
⁸⁹ ibid.
⁹⁰ George, Susan (1976) “How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger”, Penguin, p212.
⁹¹ Kapatiran (May 2008) no. 29/30.
⁹² The Press (28/5/09).
⁹³ Focus on the Global South (12/10/04) op. cit.
⁹⁴ Bello, Walden (20/6/03) op. cit. p11.
⁹⁵ Lappe, Frances Moore & Collins, Joseph (1977) “Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity”, Houghton Mifflin Co, p282.
⁹⁶ “Proclaim Jubilee: Land and Poverty” (1986/88) op. cit, p21.
⁹⁷ The Press (28/6/08).
⁹⁸ The Press (5/7/08).
⁹⁹ www.greencarcongress.com/2006/06/philippines_pre.html
¹⁰⁰ Kapatiran (May 2008) no. 29/30.
¹⁰¹www.fian.org/philippines-mining-operations-threaten-the-right-to-food-of-indigenous-peoples-siocon-zamboanga-del-norte
¹⁰² Patel, Raj (2008) “Stuffed and Starved: the hidden battle for the world food system”, Melville House.
¹⁰³ Pacific Ecologist (Summer 2009) op. cit, “Food Sovereignty Key to Resolving World’s Food Emergency”, pp56-60.
¹⁰⁴ ibid, p60.

Select Bibliography

Asia Link (May/April 1988) Centre for the Progress of Peoples, vol. X, no. 2

Bello, Walden (20/6/2003) "Multi-lateral Punishment: The Philippines in the WTO; 1995-2003", Stop the New Round Coalition & Focus on the Global South.
 
Bourne, Joel (June 2009) "The End of Plenty - Special Report: The Global Food Crisis", National Geographic, pp26-59.
 
Chongvilaivan, Aekapol (7/01/09) "ASEAN free trade magnifies hunger problem", Bangkok Post: www.bangkokpost.com/business/economics/9274/asean-free-trade-magnifies-hunger-problem;
 
Focus on the Global South (12/10/04): www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/hunger/economy/2004/1012philippines.htm 

Focus on Trade (December 2000), no.57.
 
Pacific Ecologist (Summer 2009) "Full Tanks - Empty Stomachs: Bio/agro-fuels devastate 3rd World countries for 1st World's Cars", no.17.
 
"Proclaim Jubilee: Land and Poverty" (1986/88) Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) Education Campaign.
 
Tolentino, Bruce (January 2006) "Food Security and the Threat Within: Rice Policy Reform in the Philippines", Institute of Defence & Strategic Studies (IDSS), Singapore, Working Papers, no.97.
 
Watkins, Kevin (1992) "Fixing the Rules: North-South Issues in International Trade and the GATT Uruguay Round", Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR). 



Dennis Small lives in Reefton and is a regular writer for Kapatiran. He is a member of both the Pacific Ecologist’s Advisory Board and Editorial Committee. #

Go to top