Press Release
May 20, 2011
DAVAO CITY – The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP-SMR) decried the reported P100-B losses of the National Food Authority recently exposed by the report of the Commission on Audit (COA) saying the money should have been instead used to augment the dire want of agricultural services to farmers.
“How the NFA lost this much in 10 years is a crime against the growing number of hungry and impoverished Filipinos. How dare the NFA say that these losses were incurred ‘ as part of its social mandate to help farmers’ when it is responsible for the massive rice importation causing further neglect to millions of farmers already victimized by the government’s lack of support and subsidy,” said Pedro Arnado, chairperson of KMP-SMR.
He added: “Please do not use the farmers to cover up the institutionalized corruption of this government.”
Arnado stressed that the NFA has been only buying around 1- 2 % of the local stocks when it is supposed to buy 10% of the local rice production.
He also slammed NFA’s reports on rice spillage during the unloading and transfer of stocks as petty excuses to “cover up” the real cause of NFA losses.
“Let us not fool the people. We know better. NFA has been the source of the massive corruption of government officials involved in rice importation. It would be easy to conjure up figures just to cover up the billions of money which was pocketed by government leaders especially in the time of Arroyo,” said Pedro Arnado.
Arnado recounted reports that imported rice in the last three years of the Arroyo government was overpriced at 125$ per metric ton. Years ago, Sen. Chiz Escudero also exposed that the government may have lost 5.7 billion to 13.1 billion pesos in kickbacks in the importation of 1.5 million tons of rice from Vietnam in 2009.
Worsening plight of farmers
KMP said the dependence of the government on rice importation has diminished the capacity of the local agricultural industry to provide the country ample food stocks and caused poverty of the Filipino farmers who used to be the most skilled rice producers in the Asia, of not, in the world.
Arnado said the bogus land reform law enacted in the time of Pres. Cory Aquino has been inutile in addressing landlessness.
“Farmers nationwide have remained to be the poorest of the poor. In the region, farmers continue to be exploited by greedy landlords who demand high land rent. Usurers levy inhumane interest payments over fertilizers and other farm inputs owed by farmers. Beneficiaries of the agrarian reform law could not afford the high amortization rates and the highly commercialized rates of farm inputs sold by transnational agro-chemical industries, whose products have also destroyed local rice varieties,” said Arnado.
“For instance, a corn farmer in North Cotobato who tills a 2-hectare farm in a period of four months, would get a gross income of P120,000 but this would not be enough to cover the costs of land preparation, planting, harvesting, and post – harvest hauling, shelling, drying, sacking and deliveries. What a farmer ends up with after all the rent (usually 50 – 70% share goes to landlord) and loans have been exacted from his harvest is not even enough to feed his family three times a day. The irony of it all is that a farmer cannot even afford to provide his family a fair share of the produce that he planted,” said Arnado.#
PEDRO ARNADO
0910-2261000
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