House Speaker Prospero Nograles and Palawan representative Abraham Mitra, the chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, is set to file this coming week a bill entitled “An Act promoting corporate farming and providing incentive(s) therefor“. Nograles and Mitra would require the country’s most profitable (read large) corporations to engage in agricultural production supposedly to feed their own employees. But it also aims to encourage corporations to enter rice farming in a big way, through tax incentives, government loans and even use of public land.

The proposed bill’s explanatory note states:

In addition, corporations and other business entities shall be required to engage in corporate farming with rice as their primary crop. Vast tracks of unused public lands can be tapped for such corporate farms. Corporations can also enter into joint venture agreements with farmer beneficiaries of agrarian reform communities. As such, employers will not only be able to feed their own employees and but will ensure provide ample supply to local consumers.

The classic argument for this is that corporations will be able to achieve economies of scale that small rice farmers could never hope to attain. The built-in efficiencies of corporations will allow for the cultivation of an ample rice supply at lower costs and, presumably, speed up the processing and distribution of the end product. Read the rest of this entry »

Jun Lozada made a plea not to let the rice crisis distract us from pursuing the truth about the NBN-ZTE scandal. Said he:

The pieces that complete the NBN-ZTE picture have not surfaced yet. It would really be dangerous for the Filipino people to distract themselves from the real issue of corruption.

As a sometime rice trader himself, his past experiences show that the Philippines has no problems in rice supply.

He may have a point, but the urgency of the looming rice crisis cannot be ignored. Between the pressing need to feed one’s hungry family and the convoluted tale of corruption and cover-up among our leaders, it’s not hard to predict which will draw our people’s attention and energies first. It is not just a distraction, as Mr. Lozada would like to believe. It’s a matter of life or death. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we celebrate Araw ng Kagitingan (“Day of Valor or Heroism”, in Tagalog) , which is supposed to be on April 9, but was moved up two days earlier to make it a three-day weekend. All part of the government’s “holiday economics”, the intention being that a longer weekend would boost local tourism, which is actually a good idea.

The day commemorates the Fall of Bataan on April 9, 1942, when vastly superior Japanese forces trapped the combined American and Filipino troops of the United States Armed Forces of the Far East (USAFFE) which had retreated to the Bataan peninsula. After months of fighting, the decimated USAFFE forces, running low on food, medicines and materiel , without hope of resupply or reinforcements, abandoned by their commander who was ordered to flee to Australia weeks before, surrendered Bataan to the Imperial Japanese Army. The Japanese promptly and systematically proceeded to slaughter the remnants of the Philippine commonwealth army. Those they couldn’t kill outright, they proceed to murder at leisure at the concentration camp in nearby Tarlac province, after putting them through the infamous Bataan Death March.

An abject defeat, made all the more painful by the deceitful promises of Washington that help was on the way when in fact the decision had been made to abandon the islands to the tender mercies of the Japanese. In his outstanding biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Ceasar, historian William Manchester noted that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry Stimson had:

privately told the British prime minister (Churchill) that they had written off the Philippines as a lost cause. “There are times” Stimson said “when men have to die”.

And so they did, heroically, in droves. Read the rest of this entry »

“WTF ?!?” was my immediate reaction when I saw a picture on the front page of today’s Inquirer, which shows two high-rise buildings being built right smack in the middle of the Subic rainforest. Apparently, the Philippine arm of Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction Corporation, one of the world’s largest shipbuilders and construction companies, with 2006 sales in excess of 2 billion US dollars, saw it fit to build “staff housing” for its Korean expats by tearing down a huge swatch of our diminishing forest cover. The “staff housing” consists of a 10-storey high building and another 20-storey structure which dwarf the forest growth around it. The buildings are obscene, like a cancerous growth on a baby’s face, and the picture made me ill just by looking at it.

My dismay was compounded by the claim that Hanjin got an Environmental Clearance Certificate (ECC) for the project, estimated to cost about US$ 20 million. WTF again. Having experienced the pains and tribulations of trying to get an ECC for medium-sized, legitimate enterprises on privately-owned land in non-ecologically fragile areas, it boggles the mind how Hanjin got an ECC to built what are essentially residential condominiums in a public forest.

According to Amethya Dela Llana-Kovak, Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) ecology department chief, the ECC was issued last year in a “built-up” area of the Subic forests, which supposedly allows development activities. The condos are located near a former naval magazine or ammunition depot. It doesn’t take a military genius to figure that the magazine would have been built in a fairly remote area in the Subic rainforest, for obvious reasons. It would also have left most of the surrounding area untouched, save for a mound or two housing the magazine itself and which would have been immediately reclaimed by secondary forest growth. This doesn’t mean its Ok to build high-rises in the same area. What were they thinking ? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have Anthony Bourdain and Nigella Lawson as dinner guests.

Bourdain, in an interview with Ann Limpert in Washingtonian.com tells of dinner with kitchen goddess Lawson:

I love Nigella, tearing off hunks of fatty pork. I was at dinner with Nigella and a bunch of guys, and we were all trying to out-macho each other, like ‘I’ve eaten a live cobra heart!’ Nigella has been rubbing her lips and says, ‘When I was in Spain, they aborted a pig for me and roasted the fetus. Soooo good.

I bet that shut all those macho guys up.