By MARILOU M. AGUIRRE | Davao Today
DAVAO CITY — Beatriz Gaspar, 62, said he has a son in Manila who has 10 children to feed, including a 15-year-old, the eldest. His family consumes five kilos of rice a day.
“I am now asking him to return to Davao with his family because life is less difficult here compared to Metro Manila,” said Gaspar, who lives in Ma-a.
Filipino families are having a hard time coping with the increasing prices of rice — the Filipinos’ staple food — amidst the reported local and global supply shortage.
An average family of six consumes one kilo of rice per meal or three kilos of rice a day, the women’s group Gabriela claimed during a series of protest actions held here against the unabated increase in the prices of rice.
QUEUE. In Agdao public market, people queue to buy NFA rice, which costs 18.25 pesos a kilo. With only a limited number of sacks to sell in a day, a buyer is allowed to purchase only two kilos. Instead of standing on a line, buyers are given game cards whose numbers will be called up. NFA rice is on sale three times a day: at seven and ten in the morning and at three in the afternoon.(davaotoday.com photo by Barry Ohaylan)
This means that each family needs at least 55 pesos to purchase their daily supply of rice, according to Melba Gambong, Gabriela secretary-general. The cheapest, or the rice distributed by the National Food Authority (NFA), costs 18.25 pesos per kilo while commercial rice—which is consumed by more people compared to the NFA rice—is pegged at not less than 30 pesos a kilo, according to Lorenzo Camayang, provincial manager of the National Food Authority (NFA).
“We have no control over the prices of commercial rice,” Camayang said. “We can only control that of the NFA rice,” he added.
“We can’t find cheap rice these days anymore,” according to a woman who identified herself as Neng during Gabriela’s protest march. “We used to buy 7-tonner at 24 pesos a kilo, but now, it’s more than 30 pesos a kilo,” she said.
Neng had joined the April 8 protest led by Gabriela at Rizal park against the unabated increase in rice prices. Her family who consumes commercial rice finds it hard to budget their earnings with the increasing rice prices nowadays.
She works as one of the staff of a barangay kagawad (village councilor) and earns a modest two thousand pesos a month as honorarium. Her husband, a security supervisor, earns eight thousand pesos a month. They have six children, who, in the opening of classes, have to go to school: one to college, two in high school and three in elementary.
“There may be enough supply of rice, but can the poor afford to buy?” asked Gaspar. She said that prices of basic commodities have also increased, pushing the poor to extreme hunger and poverty.
According to Gabriela, the Filipinos are suffering from the crisis of rice prices, not from supply shortage. Gabriela said that the greedy rice cartel dictates—in the absence of government’s control— the prices of commercial rice in the market.
Gabriela also said the government does not need to import rice as it had assured of enough supply of rice in the country. The group also said that importing rice is very expensive.
A kilo of imported rice from Vietnam, for example, costs 26 pesos—excluding the transportation and distribution costs—compared to rice produced by local farmers, which only costs 12 pesos a kilo.
Food, Poverty
