Philippine President Gloria Arroyo convened a food summit yesterday with top officials and farm experts to help the country cope with soaring rice prices, the agriculture secretary said.
Amid growing concern about unrest over the steep hikes in the cost of the country’s diet staple, Arroyo was looking for ways to ensure food supplies for the Philippines, one of the world’s top importers of rice.
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap said the meeting was aimed at “unifying our initiatives to guarantee food security,” as steep prices have caused countries around the region to look urgently at the problem.
PHOTO:EPA
The Philippines, a major rice importer, has been one of the countries hardest hit by the increase in rice prices, which are near record highs — leading some experts to warn Asian governments they could face domestic unrest.
Yap said Arroyo was expected to announce yesterday fresh initiatives to “cushion the impact of the looming global food crunch arising from tightening supplies and escalating prices of rice, corn, wheat and other grains.”
He insisted that the Philippines had enough rice for now. The government has announced plans to import 1.5 million tonnes of the staple cereal this year, of which 700,000 tonnes are expected to arrive in July.
Yap said the government had the capacity to import “up to 2.7 million tonnes” this year, but did not say if that figure will be reached.
“With imports on the way and a bumper summer crop ... the country will have more than an adequate supply of rice for the rest of the year,” he said.
But the government is investigating unscrupulous private traders amid allegations of hoarding and the illegal sale of government-subsidized rice at nearly double the recommended price.
The Philippine military was called in on Thursday to help deliver rice to poor neighborhoods in the Manila.
inflation
Rice is not the only key commodity whose price is going sharply up. The National Statistics Office said yesterday that rising food prices helped push last month’s inflation to a 20-month high of 6.4 percent.
It cited “upward movements in the prices of the heavily weighted food items such as rice, flour and flour products, pork, cooking oil, selected spices and seasonings, milk and milk products.”
Among the issues to be discussed at the meeting, Yap said, the government was to consider more spending on the farm sector, which statisticians say has shrunk to less than a fifth of the economy despite accounting for more than a third of its labor force.
Funds would be channelled to irrigation, other rural infrastructure, on post-harvest facilities and on research and development, easing credit to farmers, and on finding more local and foreign markets for Philippine products.
Congressional members who will attend the meeting are to be asked to act on pending bills on national land use, which aim to stop the “unbridled conversion of prime farmlands into non-agricultural uses.”
Yap said the government would expand areas planted to rice in the coming wet season, and will attempt to squeeze in a third cropping in certain areas, to sustain yields and attain self-sufficiency.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion