Focus back on hunger issues

Ed Javier / Where I Stand

For a brief while, the country focused on what really matters to the ordinary Filipino: food.

Just before the papal visit, Sen. Grace Poe called on her colleagues in the Senate to address hunger woes besetting our countrymen, particularly our children.

This was a timely call and it came at a time when her fellow lawmakers appeared to be overwhelmed by investigative work.

Poe’s call to address hunger and malnutrition among children came in the wake of the National Nutrition Survey report that showed that there has been little progress in the bid to end hunger among Filipino children.

“No Filipino child should be left behind and remain undernourished,” she said as she called for the budget allocation for children’s meals in schools.

Poe, who placed second to Vice President Jejomar Binay in the latest 2016 presidential race survey of Laylo Research, disclosed that more than 9.3 million hungry Filipino families—corresponding to about 7.36 million children below the age of 5, are gripped by hunger.

“Two out of every 10 children up to the age of 5 were found to be underweight. Three out of 10 aged 6 to 10 did not quite measure up in terms of height and worse, 8 out of every 100 kids aged 10 and below may be described as ‘wasted’—skin and bones and not much else,” Poe said.

This is a laudable move even if it looks like a mere palliative. The problem of proper and sufficient nutrition goes beyond just access to food. The other part of the problem is the country’s ability to produce enough food for our rapidly growing population, at lower production cost so food remains affordable to ordinary Filipinos.

The problem of food production may have been highlighted by the very performance of the agriculture sector last year; it dipped to 2.7 percent in the third quarter of 2014, the lowest in five years.

Many analysts attribute the slowdown of the country’s overall economic performance to reduced spending in the agriculture sector and the drop in crop production.

According to reports, crop production contracted 5 percent due to the damage sustained by palay, corn, coconut and other crops in the face of typhoons and massive pest attacks.

Crop production, unfortunately, accounts for 44.5 percent of the total output of the agriculture sector.

Unless the vulnerability of the crop-production sector is decisively addressed, the government may not even have enough food for the free meals to our children envisioned by Sen. Poe’s legislative initiative.

In fairness to the agriculture-sector policy makers and implementers, the government appears serious in taking steps to address crop production issues. The government pointed to the empowerment of farmers as the key. Part of the empowerment is improving their access to the markets for their produce and their access to modern agriculture technology, which makes possible the development of crop varieties that are less vulnerable to the forces of nature and to the attack of deadly pests.

It may interest Sen. Poe to know that such modern agriculture technology has also made it possible to develop rice varieties that can be grown without massive pesticide applications and which contain built-in nutrients that prevent blindness among children.

Unfortunately, the progress and application of this modern agriculture science called biotechnology has been blocked by the powerful Europe-based lobby group called Greenpeace.

The group has been scaring our farmers—although with apparently little effect—about agriculture biotechnology. Ironically, crops developed through this method, such as biotech corn, have proven to be a saving factor both to our farmers and to our food-production goals.

For one, these crops types have built-in resistance to pests, which is why farmers planting such varieties save money on production costs. They are also able to spare themselves from the effects of chemicals on their health.

The same technology is now being eyed for rice and eggplant production. For a while, there was a loud call for the development of biotech coconut varieties, which can withstand the onslaught of cocolisap sans the use of big amounts of chemical pesticides.

The role of modern agriculture biotechnology in food production and food security aspirations is being advanced by our scientists from the University of the Philippines-Los Baños (UPLB).

Unfortunately, our scientists’ hands appear to have been handcuffed at the moment following the success of Greenpeace agents in the country to stop their research on and field trials for biotech crop varieties.

If the likes of Greenpeace permanently succeed in blocking major food-production initiatives in the country, our farmers may have to live with the use of traditional crop varieties that rely heavily on chemical pesticides and which are highly vulnerable to the forces of nature.

That grim prospect may leave Sen. Poe with very little to feed our undernourished children with.