Not Yet Sikat

• Let’s start off with Senor Enrique’s post about the early chinese rice traders of Manila:

By the 1890s, over 2,000,000 pesos worth of rice was being imported annually by the Filipino-Chinese from China. On Juan Luna Street in Binondo, establishments owned by Chinese rice importers were skillfully mixing poor quality Saigon rice with good grades of native varieties and sold at low prices. This type of merchandising reached its peak — and the Chinese rice traders their greatest success — during the Philippine Revolution of 1896-1902.

• The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) tells us about a GLOBAL rice crisis– yup, it’s not really confined to the Philippines alone but it’s a worldwide phenomenon:

The Philippines produces about 90 percent of the rice it needs but also today needs to import up to 2.1 million metric tons, to be able to maintain its two-month inventory. Over the last three months, that inventory has thinned by 20 percent…

…In 2006, then Agriculture Secretary Domingo Panganiban told Reuters: “Except for a brief period in the seventies, the last time this nation produced enough rice to feed itself was in 1903, the year the Wright brothers (Wilbur and Orville) invented the airplane.”

…galloping population growth rate has unduly stepped up the demand for rice, even as production has remained low or stagnant.

• Bulatlat quotes Rafael Mariano, chairman of the militant Kilusang Mambubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP):

“It is crystal clear that there is an actual crisis that is why Malacanang is trying to increase our rice stock through importation. The rice cartel or the Binondo 7 knows this and that is the reason why they are hoarding and increasing their prices. Now, importing more rice from other countries will only make matters worse because there is no more rice supply in the world market available for export and second a food security program based on imports is not food security at all. It will only make us more dependent on other countries and hold our food security hostage to other interests. What we need now are immediate rice price controls and at least a 25 percent increase in the local procurement of rice of the NFA, so that the cartel cannot get their hands on the April-June harvest. These are our only chance to stave off the rice crisis until we implement genuine agrarian reform, so that this will not happen again,” ended Mariano.

• The warriorlawyer reports that Jun Lozada made a plea not to let the rice crisis distract us from pursuing the truth about the NBN-ZTE scandal.

Maybe it’s time we just feasted on pan de regla.