Let’s Rice to the Occasion (Who’s to blame for the Philippine Rice Crisis?)
When you see hundreds of people standing in line for hours under the hot sun so they can buy 2 kilograms of NFA rice – so that they can save P50 – who do you blame?
When you look back and see that during the time of President Marcos, we were a rice-exporting country but today, we are one of the world’s top importer of rice, who do you blame?
When you realize that our neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam, are the world’s top exporters of rice and yet many of their advances in rice farming were developed in the International Rice Research Institute in Laguna, who do you blame for our own country’s lack of progress in rice farming?
I have the same sentiments. Sometimes, I ask myself how much worse things can be in the future. This is clearly a result of someone’s negligence. Evidently, the government is easier to blame but I believe this issue is bigger than we can imagine and clearly, it appears to me that this is either a result of a grand scheme to manipulate us all or a situation that got way out of hand. Either way, they who are responsible for this are the least affected. I also believe that the media has an important role to play (as always). I wrote an article in my blog that’s somehow related to this issue.