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Farmers denounced President Rodrigo Duterte for signing the rice tariffication bill into law last Feb. 15.The law removes the quantitative restrictions on the importation of rice and imposes tariffs on rice imports.

The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP)  said the law “is equivalent to a death sentence for the local rice industry and rice farmers.” 

KMP said the law will directly affect 13.5 million palay farmers and their families, 17.5 million farm workers, and more than 10 million Filipinos dependent on NFA rice, 20,000 rice retailers and 55,000 rice mill workers. 

Under the law, National Food Authority will no longer supply low-priced rice to the local market. Government’s rice buffer stock will only be for emergency and disaster relief. The average volume of NFA rice for disaster relief operations is about 30,000 metric tons or 600,000 bags a year.

Furthermore, the NFA will no longer maintain stock for stabilization of supply and price at the consumer level especially during lean months.

Danilo Ramos, KMP chairperson, said in a statement, “It’s the beginning of the end of the local rice industry. Even with the rice industry enhancement fund, the local rice industry do not stand a chance with massive rice imports.”

Ramos said the country’s decades of experience under the World Trade Organization proved that rice importation policy was never a guarantee of sufficient rice supply and lower rice prices.  

According to Ibon Foundation, from 2008 to 2010, the country imported an annual average of 2.2 million metric tons of rice but the price continued to increase at an annual average of P1.20 per kilo until 2016.

In a separate statement, rice watch group Bantay Bigas and the peasant women group Amihan or the National Federation of Peasant women said the law will destroy the country’s self-sufficiency and self-reliance for food.

Meanwhile, Anakpawis Partylist Rep. Ariel Casilao vowed to file a bill for the repeal of the law on the date it shall take effect.

Relying on rice imports, he said, is contrary to food security.

“The law is a tombstone for the Philippine rice industry, and will be buried to death, the livelihood and welfare of 2.4 million rice farmers and more farm workers…” Casilao said.
 
He added that the law will undermine the P350 billion – 19 million metric ton – palay sector. “This is clearly betrayal of the people’s and national interest,” he said.

Casilao warned that Duterte will earn the fury of tens of millions of rice stakeholders, including the poor consumers.

“Hunger, poverty, death, will be the only legacies the poor will remember about this regime,” he said.

Casilao has been pushing for “an authentic rice industry development program” to solve the chronic rice crisis in the country. He is the author of the House Bill No. 8512 Rice Industry Development Act bill and HB 555 Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill (GARB).

The post Farmers slam Duterte for ‘sealing death of PH rice industry’ with tariffication law appeared first on Bulatlat.

On July 23, 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte signed Executive Order No. 2 mandating public access to information held by the agencies and offices of the executive branch. The nongovernmental organizations that had been campaigning for a freedom of information (FOI) act for decades welcomed it with cautious optimism. The Executive Order (EO) encouraged the legislature and judiciary to do the same, but the FOI advocates nevertheless pointed out the need for a law that would cover all three branches of government.

Access to information is both a public right as well as an indispensable means of checking corruption by enabling citizen monitoring of government. But the Benigno Aquino III administration and its allies in the House of Representatives resisted the enactment of any FOI law during its entire six-year watch (2010-2016).

Mr. Aquino III said at one point that the press was already “too powerful” and did not need an FOI act. He was mistaken in assuming that it would serve only the media. Such a law would benefit the citizenry most by making readily accessible information on what government is doing and plans to do as a means of uncovering and checking wrongdoing and corruption.

A Senate version passed that chamber, and several FOI bills were filed in the House during the past administration. But most of the latter contained so many exemptions to what information could be accessed that if passed they would have limited rather than enhanced the public’s capacity to obtain government-held information. Other versions not as flawed were prevented from being passed by such obviously contrived barriers as lack of quorum, and some congressmen’s introducing unacceptable riders in the bills, among them right of reply provisions.

FOI advocates initially welcomed the Duterte EO as an indication of the regime’s departure from the Aquino III administration’s opposition to a freedom of information act. Within months after the signing of EO No. 2, however, hope had turned into disappointment.

Not only was there no indication that the House would ever pass an FOI bill into law, the Duterte EO itself also made it even more difficult to obtain information from the agencies and offices of the executive branch. Requests for information from the media were either rejected outright because the requested information was among those that Malacañang had decreed may not be released, or they were given the run-around with the argument that the information being requested was in this or that office rather than in the custody of the agency where the request was originally filed. Some offices also devised complicated processes that made getting information from them extremely difficult.

The long and the short of it is that the Duterte regime, despite EO No. 2 and Mr. Duterte’s repeated claims of a commitment to reducing, if not ending, government corruption, eventually demonstrated that it is as opposed to freedom of information as its predecessor.

Make that even more opposed. Instead of an FOI bill, Mr. Duterte’s House allies passed on Jan. 30 a resolution making it nearly impossible for the public and the media to access their Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN), which contain information crucial to monitoring corruption among members of the House of Representatives.

House Resolution 2467 pays lip service to the Constitution by citing that document’s requiring every government official and employee to file a SALN on or before April 30 every year, but in reality violates it by undermining the people’s right to information.

The resolution imposes severe restrictions on accessing the SALNs of the so-called representatives of the people. The restrictions were put together by the SALN Review and Compliance Committee that Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo created, with some of her closest accomplices in that body as members.

Its most obviously repressive provision is Rule V, Section 14, which makes the release of information on any congressman or woman’s SALN possible only with the approval of the House plenary — meaning the majority of its current membership of over 200.

The congressman or woman whose SALN has been requested can also object to its being released. Only copies of the latest SALNs can be provided. Requests for previous statements will be granted only if considered “justifiable” by the SALN committee and the House Secretary General. Comparing the past and present SALNs of a government official is of course one way of establishing by how much his or her assets have grown and whether they can be explained or not.

The requesting party is also required to submit a form containing personal and employment information, the purpose of the request, and why copies of previous SALNs are being requested. It specifically mentions the media, and imposes additional requirements on any media person’s request, among them proof of his or her media affiliation and the media organization’s accreditation to establish the legitimacy of the media practitioner.

The same resolution imposes a number of other conditions and threatens the requesting party with criminal, civil and administrative liability in case he or she violates any of them.

Once a request is approved, copies of the SALN will cost P300 each — which means that a request for several SALNs can be costly. But in addition, the copies will be released only after they have been edited by the House’s Director of Records Management, specifically by blacking out the address of the SALN declarant, the names of his unmarried children below 18, the locations of his real estate properties, the names and addresses of his business and financial connections and those of his relatives in government, and other data.

These restrictions do not only make it difficult, they make it practically impossible to get a copy of the SALN of any member of the House because of the requirement that it be approved by the plenary and its release allowed by the subject concerned. But even if a request is granted, the SALN copies would be practically useless, since they have been redacted prior to their release.

Meanwhile, the provision that requires a media person to provide proof of his or her media affiliation effectively prevents freelance journalists from even filing a request for a copy of a House member’s SALN.

Equally disturbing is the SALN Review and Compliance Committee’s being empowered to question and evaluate the purpose of the request. A journalist who is doing research to determine if there was a suspiciously huge increase in a House member’s assets, which may prove that he or she may have personally benefitted from, say, the construction of a bridge or roadwork by a company owned by a relative, would be prevented from getting that information by the restrictions imposed by HR 2467.

What is glaringly evident is that the resolution is meant to conceal wrongdoing by preventing the information to which citizens are entitled from getting to them either through their own efforts or the media’s.

Those responsible for this latest outrage — almost the entire House membership passed it — against good and honest governance are not representatives of the people. Like their co-conspirators in the executive and judicial branches of government, they represent only themselves and their personal, familial, and class interests to the detriment of the people’s own. That is the message HR 2467 is loudly and clearly sending to the entire citizenry.

Luis V. Teodoro is on Facebook and Twitter (@luisteodoro).

www.luisteodoro.com

Published in Business World
Feb. 14, 2019

The post Representing themselves appeared first on Bulatlat.

This week I had interesting interactions with senior citizens in some barangays of Quezon City, Manila, and the cities of Caloocan and Malabon. These were public forums that had been organized to encourage voter participation in the mid-term elections to be held on May 13.

They were visibly very poor: and physically their communities haven’t changed much since I began visiting in 2001. Two places I visited in Manila and Malabon consisted mostly of shanties with very little, if any, spaces in between: scraggly structures made of discarded wood and cardboard boxes, recycled plastic sheets and old tarpaulin signs. In fact, the dwellings have become even more crowded than when our party-list group Bayan Muna (of which I’m president) first began inquiring into their lives and organizing around their everyday concerns.

How can they even begin to take a step forward? For nearly 30 years now, the people in some areas of Catmon (in Malabon City), have been struggling to defend their flimsy homes against the demolition attempts of private parties claiming ownership of the lots they occupy. Armed goons have been harassing them, and one community leader has been killed while another escaped an armed attack on his home.

At least two families, who challenged the ownership claims in the lower courts, have won their initial legal fights through the free legal aid of human-rights lawyers. How far they still have to go, and their neighbors too, we don’t know. For now they’re trying to find a bit of satisfaction in these little victories.

But when I met with the community leaders, they were in combative mood and high spirits.

And definitely, when we began talking about the possibility of pushing for a social pension for them, their faces lighted up. They were interested to be updated about the pending legislation in the House of Representatives, which seeks to increase to at least P1,000 the measly P500 monthly social pension or stipend provided to certain indigent senior citizens by the current law.

In fact, many of them had already joined march-rallies at the gate of the Batasang Pambansa in support of the proposed legislation, which there are eight versions. At public hearings held by the House committee on population and family relations, they have shown keen interest in Bayan Muna’s version of the bill, filed on Oct. 4, 2016, which would raise the social pension to P2,000 and remove the restrictive qualifications for indigent senior citizens to receive the aid.

The eight versions of the proposed legislation, which the House committee has consolidated in one bill, all aim to amend the provision pertaining to social pension under Republic Act 9994 (the Expanded Senior Citizens Act of 2010). The law has already been amended twice. Section 2 of RA 9994 states:

“Indigent senior citizen refers to any elderly who is frail, sickly, or with disability and without pension or permanent source of income, compensation or financial assistance from his/her relatives for support [in] his/her basic needs, as determined by the Department of Social Work and Development (DSWD) in consultation with the National Coordinating and Monitoring Board.”

The consolidated bill is now going through the legislative mill. The amendments it proposes are as follows:

• The social pension – or the “monthly stipend or monetary grant from the government to augment the daily subsistence and other medical needs of senior citizens” – shall not be less than P1,000.

The qualifying phrase, “who are frail, sickly or with disability,” has been deleted. The deletion, which Bayan Muna explicitly espoused, has been roundly welcomed by the poor senior citizens.

• All senior citizens without pension and who are receiving pension amounting to P3,500 and lower from the Government Service Insurance System or GSIS (retired government employees), the Social Security System or SSS (retired private sector workers), and the Pension and Gratuity Management Center (PGMC) shall be entitled to a monthly stipend of at least P1,000.

• Congress shall review the amount of the pension every two years, in consultation with the Commission on Senior Citizens (an entity proposed in a separate legislation), or in its absence, the DSWD, taking into account the national inflation rate and other relevant economic indicators.

• Any senior citizen may opt not to receive the monthly social pension and instead donate it to the Office for Senior Citizens Affairs (OSCA) or to any government-accredited nongovernmental organization (NGO) for senior citizens operating in the congressional district where the donor resides. The donation shall be used to augment the medical needs of senior citizens in the district.

For too long a time, the welfare of senior citizens and retirees has been poorly given attention and appropriate action by the government. For a broader and deeper perspective on this issue, here are some relevant data.

Statistics available at the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) show how the number of senior citizens has been increasing through the years. In 1995, there were 3.7 million (5.4 percent of the population). The number had increased to 5.8 million, or 6.5 percent of the population, by 2010. The latest PSA data show that senior citizens number 7.8 million, or 16.2 percent of the population.

A study by the Coalition of Services of the Elderly (Cose) showed only 17 percent of senior citizens receive the mandatory P500 monthly social pension, according to IBON Foundation.

Among the pensioners under the SSS program, 2.2 million retirees (27 percent of the elderly) receive at least the minimum P1,200 monthly pension; the average SSS pension is P3,200/month. Under the GSIS program, 272,000 retirees (3.5 percent of the elderly) are receiving at least the minimum P5,000 monthly pension.

Altogether, only 3.4 million, or 42.9 percent of all senior citizens, receive pensions from the SSS, the GSIS, and the Expanded Senior Citizens Law. The majority of 4.5 million (57 percent) are not covered by any program and don’t receive any pension at all.

Indeed, the P1,000 additional social pension now pending in the House, though clearly inadequate to meet the elderly’s needs, must be urgently approved. And much more needs to be done, even in the cases of the SSS and the GSIS. This is where public awareness and social organizing need to focus.

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Email: satur.ocampo@gmail.com

Published in Philippine Star
Feb. 16, 2019

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