What do you tell a farmer who complains that life in the farm is difficult these days because the buying price of palay is very low at ten pesos per kilo? (I can tell him - that is a major reason for having elections).
His break-even price is fifteen pesos. At seventeen pesos he can barely have enough capital for next season. If he does not plant rice next season, we will have a huge food security problem.
What makes the situation very serious is that traders and the National Food Authority have stopped buying rice. This could mean that the price next week could be lower than ten pesos.
No doubt about it. Hunger will be common among families in these rice producing areas of Leyte until at best next harvest season when, hopefully, prices will be higher.
It looks like both the national government and the local government units were caught flat-footed. They did not expect that this situation, or maybe nightmare, will happen, especially during the height of the campaign season. They can still scramble by raising prices through a rice subsidy. But the damage has been done. It is a kind of damage that cannot be solved in a month or two and the election is just three weeks away.
To put them into effect will take months to transform plans to reality. And a lot of funding support which may not be available at this time because of the election ban on government expenditures in aid of election and, therefore, such subsidy at this time will be an election offense.
It will be considered vote-buying. So the price subsidy has to wait until after the May 12, 2025 elections.
What can happen is extensive vote-buying. But will rice farmers who lost thousands of pesos per family succumb to vote buying, a short-term solution that they know will not be enough to solve their miserable conditions and lack of food on the table? They will hold accountable the government officials who placed them in this situation.
A natural tendency is for the farmers to look for people who will understand their problems in real life and will do something about these because they have a good record of solving such problems and they have the sincerity to listen to the pleas of and calls for help from farmers.
A major problem that will confront these officials will be credibility. Will the rice farmers believe them when they were the ones who placed the farmers in such a terrible, almost life and death situation?
As a lawyer I am enamored by the debate on the legality or illegality of the arrest of former President Rodrigo Duterte. But as a citizen and a student of development all my life, the plight of the rice farmer in Leyte transcends legal tussles. It is about the daily confrontation of poverty groups with the realities of eking a living in the midst of officials who don’t seem to care about what happens to farmers.
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