Mr. President, dear colleagues:

I have always said that there’s an unli-rice loving gene in our DNA. It shows in our per capita rice consumption, which is 108 kilograms a year. But for most people, like me, it shows up in our abs.

Allow me to illustrate my point further, Mr. President, by computing how much rice we 24 senators, and our spouses, consume in a year, and how it is produced.

Forty eight people would require 5,177 kilos, or 103 and a half sacks, a year. But rice does not come milled—it has to be dehusked from palay.

To produce the equivalent of 5,177 kilos, or 5.17 metric tons, we need 7,803 kilos of palay. And to be able to harvest that amount, we have to plant rice in two hectares, or 20,000 square meters— the size of 48 basketball courts.

Just for 48 people alone. And we are 108 million crammed in this sliver of land. That is why we devote 4.8 million hectares of land to produce this staple.

Suppose the 48 of us hire a farmer to contract-grow our rice consumption. What will be his net income? What travails will he have to go through so we can have a bowl of fragrant rice?

First, Mr. President, he needs water, because rice is one crop with a serious drinking problem.

To produce one Coke litro of rice, you need 1,000 Coke litros of water. So rice is dependent on the grace of God, meaning good weather, and good governance as well, which means man-made irrigation. Fortunately, we have a surplus of the former, and unfortunately, a shortage of the latter.

After marinating the soil, our contract-grower, or let us say, our senatorial tenant, will now be ready to plow.

If he uses a carabao, he will slog through about 45 kilometers of thigh-deep mud, with a plow in one hand, and the reins of a half-ton beast of burden on the other. Mas mahaba pa kaysa sa isang marathon.

If he uses a hand tractor, it will cut his man-hours by half.

Ang lupa po for rice planting ay mas mabusisi pa ang preparasyon kesa sa buhok ng isang dalagang ikakasal. I-aararo ng dalawang beses, isusuklay, isusuyod.

When the soil assumes champorado texture, pwede na magtanim. Dalawang paraan ang ginagamit: Direct broadcast of seeds o sabog, or transplant, where seeds will germinate in a plot, the seedlings uprooted, then transported to the field for transplanting.

Dito papasok yung national soundtrack ng rice planting. “Magtanim ay di biro, maghapon nakayuko.”

To plant palay in one hectare of land, something like 200,000 clutches of seedlings will be pierced into the soil. Kung sampu ang magtatanim, mga 20,000 repetitive motions are required of each.

Di hamak, talo ang 3,000 forward bends ng ating Pambansang Kamao na ginagawa niya tuwing umaga kapag siya ay nasa training.

Pag natanim, kailangan bantayan ang tubig. And the countryside is littered with the bodies of those who have fallen in these neighbourhood water wars.

Then the field is fertilized, weeded and sprayed with pesticides.

After 12 weeks, the grains begin to sprout. When their color turns golden, they will be subjected to ceaseless attacks from air, ground, and water.

Early on, amphibian kuhols will wade to the stems. Later, mayas will divebomb from the air. Rats will burrow beneath.

The farmer’s protection against them is feeble – a scarecrow and a string of empty cans for some acoustic warfare.

Pagkalipas ng 30 araw, pwede na anihin. Mabilisan minsan, buong gabi kung parating ang bagyong tulad ni Ompong. The clump of rice stacks can be cut by hand, or by small reaping machines, or those big boxy combines which spill out grains.

Kapag naani na, hindi pwedeng lutuin. Malayo pa ang lalakbayin bago masaing.

Kung manu-mano tulad ng dati, it has to be threshed and winnowed. Buti na lang mayroon nang mga makinang gumagawa nito.

Pagkatapos ay isasako. Pero bago dalhin sa gilingan, ibibilad muna, para mawala ang moisture content, tumigas ang butil at hindi mapulbos kapag giniling.

Solar drying is a tedious process. You transport the bags to the roadside—kasi nga ang kalsada sa atin ay drying pavements din—ibubuhos mo, you rake it, then rebag it.

Ready na for milling. During milling, the palay will lose about 35 percent of its weight. Ito yung tinatawag nila na milling, or retention, or conversion rate. Isasako muli. Dadalhin sa palengke. Pwede na lutuin.

Pati sa pagluto, sobrang arte ng bigas. Dapat 1:1 ang ratio ng water to rice, under the right amount of fire otherwise it will turn into a congee or toasted rice. Pag nahilaw, ang ginagawa dati, nilalagyan pa ng asin sa takip, na may sabay na sign of the cross.

Kapag luto na, highly perishable, hindi pwede abutan ng hapon.

And all these troubles, for rice high in carbs and sugar, which has transformed us into a nation of Diabetics Anonymous.

Magkano naman ang kita nung magsasaka na kinontrata ng 48 na tao para magsupply ng bigas sa kanila?
Kung hindi siya mamalasin, per cropping, two hectares of rice land will gross about P152,000, a year ago. Deducting expenses, the net was about P74,000.

In two croppings per year, in perfect weather conditions, pest- and pestilence-free: about P148,000. Or P12,333 per month, about minimum wage level.

Pero ano ang national average production per hectare per year? 4,000 kilos. Ibig sabihin, ang neto na kita ng rice farmer na may dalawang ektarya ay P6,700 kada buwan—mas mababa sa minimum wage.

Buti na lang maraming magsasaka na madiskarte. Hindi lang umaasa sa palay, pero nagtatanim ng gulay, nag-aalaga ng hayop.

Tapos kapag binenta nila ang kanilang produkto ng mataas, aalma ang consumer, magaalsa ang mga trolls.

And this has been the conflict ever since: the eternal battle between the poor rice producers and the poor rice consumers.

You tilt the balance in favor of one, it destroys the equilibrium.

You force two million farmers to sell at a low price, then we are treating them as indentured serfs who must subsidize the food we eat.

But what can he do? Fertilizers and pesticides eat up eight percent of his income; labor – during tillage, planting, harvesting, and handling – accounting for another 16 percent.

So for one peso investment, ang babalik ay 12 centavos, not counting the unpaid family labor. No wonder that those who feed the nation have to live under this irony: Kung sino ang nagtatanim ng palay, siya pa ang nangungutang ng pambili ng instant noodles.

Rice farming is beset with structural problems:

As a narrow and scattered archipelago, we are not blessed with flat lands conducive to rice farming.

Unlike those in the Asian mainland, we don’t source our irrigation from wide watersheds and mighty mountain ranges.

Rising population diminishes our farmland inventory. We are not only losing lands to urbanization but farmers as well. The millennials leave, the milleniors stay.

Being an archipelago bereft of an efficient mass transport system, it is expensive for us to transport goods by land or water. Ma-traffic na, may kotong pa.

Actually, our farmers are competitive with their ASEAN counterparts. It is post-farm gate, after palay has been sold by farmers, that prices shoot up.

In one study by PhilRice, 9 pesos per kilo in the store price of milled rice is due to trading and marketing costs, which farmers have no hand in.

These, plus other factors, hinder our bid for rice self-sufficiency. To wean us out of our love for rice, the best solution according to one WAG is to create genetically modified Filipinos who shun this staple, but that is in the realm of fantasy science.

To make rice available and affordable, the next best thing is to support our farmers, entice them to cultivate other high-yielding crops, make us fall in love with root crops, and any deficit in our basic staple requirement, be filled by imports.

Dumarami din kasi tayo. We love babies so much that we produce them in industrial quantities. If we will be in plenary for 40 minutes, then by the time we adjourn, 136 babies would have been born, who will consume 16 tons of rice yearly.

Kung kukulangin talaga ang bigas, then we import, but calibrated in a way that will it not trample rice prices nor trigger a stampede of farmers out of rice growing. Iwasan natin ang voluntary mass endo ng milyun-milyong magsasaka ng palay because of the economic dislocation it will cause.

Lalo na po ngayon na ang realidad sa kanayunan ay ang rice farming being a secondary occupation. Maraming middle class, teachers, negosyante who are weekend farmers, who till legacy farms, who can also afford to abandon them.

When rice farming is abandoned en masse, it makes us food-insecure, because rice is a thinly-traded commodity. One major crop failure in one major producer will dry up surplus rice for global sale.

Buti na lang ang mga ito ay kinonsidera ng ating butihing Chairman ng Agriculture and Food – who is the wisest of the Villars today. The husband lands on the Forbes list, but it is she who is responsible for it.

First, the tariff rates balance the interest of the farmer and the consumer. The gradations are essential because a one-rule for all does not apply here. Some policy nuances are needed.
Let me repeat them:

For the Minimum Access Volume (MAV) committed by the Philippines to WTO, the indicated rates in the applicable provisions of the WTO agreement on agriculture shall apply;

For ASEAN Member States, 35% or the import duty rate commitment of the Philippines for rice importation, pursuant to the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement or ATIGA; and;

For non-ASEAN states, 50% or the tariff equivalent calculated in accordance with the WTO agreement on agriculture upon the expiration of the waiver relating to the special treatment for rice of the Philippines, whichever is higher.

The President has emergency buttons to press under this bill. He may impose a lower applied tariff rate when shortage looms or buffer dangerously dips.

On the other hand, it provides for a special rice safeguard duty to protect local growers from sudden or extreme price fluctuations, in accordance with Safeguard Measures Act.

What do the two provisions uphold? Equal protection. Meaning, no one has to be thrown under the bus.

One excellent feature of the bill is that it pools tariff collections under a Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund, with a seed funding of P10 billion, frontloaded. Prepaid, hindi postpaid.

The RCEF will be apportioned pursuant to a fixed menu, because we have learned our lesson from the recent past that having loose regulations is tantamount to rolling out the red carpet for rats into a rice warehouse.

I will no longer belabor the recipients. Suffice it to say that they touch all bases to help the farmers, improve productivity and modernize farming systems.

The consumer wins, too, especially those in the bottom of the economic pyramid, the inflation-hit 20 percent who use 21 percent of their income on rice.

Madaliin po natin ito because rice lines, if they grow longer and linger, are like a noose on the neck of a government, which strangles it slowly no matter how popular it is.

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Download Senate Bill No. 1998: Quantitative Import Restrictions on Rice