THE PHILIPPINES is an agricultural country and as ironic as it gets, the people who are providing us food, our farmers and fisherfolks are among the poorest of the poor. Records from the Philippine Statistics Authority show that these sectors have the highest poverty incidence in 2015 at 34.3 percent and 34 percent, respectively.
The survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations from September 15-23, 2018 revealed that 13.3 percent or an estimated 3.1 million families experienced involuntary hunger at least once in the past three months. While 821 million people or one in nine of the world’s population faced food shortage in 2017 according to a UN report.
These numbers are alarming and warrant urgent and strategic actions. However, our government either put aside the issue or address it in depraved way.
In our country, farmers have been struggling to keep their livelihoods afloat because of debts they cannot repay for seeds and chemical inputs owned by business companies. This is on top of the concerns on the impact of climate change to agriculture, the emergence of genetically modified organisms (GMO) that threatens the very ecosystem, the lack of new farmer practitioners and thus further threatening food security. Likewise, the enactment of Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion Act (TRAIN) exacerbates the condition of the lives of people especially those who are living in below poverty line.
Living a dignified life means having access to food, including the other basic needs like shelter and clothing. Unfortunately, not all people enjoy this opportunity thus, some poor people struggle more just to survive by collecting and eating leftover food. The food waste produced globally is so staggering that each year, 1.6 billion tons of food worth some $1.2 trillion are lost or go to waste, one-third of the total amount of food produced globally.
On this celebration of World Food Day, we highlight our grave concern on the emergence of GMOs. PMPI strongly opposes the looming field trials of golden rice in Muñoz, Nueva Ecija and San Mateo, Isabela. Golden rice variety poses a threat to environment, public health, and farmers’ livelihood. It is just another scheme by the agrochemical transnational corporations (TNCs) to control the sector of food and agriculture, which would later on making the farmers dependent on their patented genetically modified seeds and expensive chemical inputs.
(Excerpted from the statement of the Philippine Misereor Partnership, Inc. on World Food Day, 16 October 2018)
