Anti-Chinese cracks in Philippine
rice bowls By Donald Kirk
MANILA - Ask a woman named Cora why these
days she has to spend so much more for rice for
her food stand and family and she's got a fast
racial response. "The Chinese are the ones," she
said without hesitation. "They are handling all
these things. They are the capitalists of the
Philippines."
Shopping for the lowest
prices in one of Manila's traditional markets,
Cora blames "seven names" - the names of the
Filipino-Chinese merchants who are widely accused
of hoarding rice in order to reap higher and
higher profits by driving up prices.
"They
are trying to sell the rice at the highest price,"
she said, even as President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo's government has promised to
crack down on hoarding, in hopes of staving off
both a
looming rice shortage in a
country now swollen to 90 million people and
ethnic tensions against the minority ethnic
Chinese merchant class.
Searches by
agencies such as the National Bureau of
Investigation, the National Food Authority and the
Presidential Anti-Smuggling Group appear, however,
to have barely scratched the surface of what is a
perennial problem here. For Filipinos, rice is a
thrice-daily staple - devoured three times a day,
that is, by those with enough money to buy it.
After discovering what was reported as
"thousands of sacks of rice" in more than 100
warehouses in a province north of here, a top
intelligence official with the National Bureau of
Investigation confessed that his men did not have
search warrants and were only "carefully studying"
to see "if there are violators".
One
favorite scam of rice traders is to repackage
50-kilogram bags that the government distributes
to poor areas at nearly half the current price of
32 pesos, or US$0.80, per kilogram. Investigators
discovered just one warehouse implicated in the
racket - next to none compared with the scores of
warehouses believed to be involved in such rackets
routinely.
With her popularity plummeting
to about 23%, according to a Pulse Asia poll,
Arroyo's worst fear is starvation among those
categorized as living in poverty - or one-third of
the populace subsisting on less than 80 pesos per
day.
Incredibly, the Philippines has not
been rice-sufficient since the 1960s despite a
"green revolution" in production engineered at the
famous rice institute of the University of the
Philippines at Los Banos. Some specialists say the
"miracle rice" so highly touted 40 years ago is
actually less tough than the original variety -
and more susceptible to blight and environmental
damage from rising pollution in the midst of rapid
population growth.
The deficit in rice
began to spiral during the 20-year-rule of
Ferdinand Marcos, who defeated Arroyo's father,
Diosdado Macapagal, the incumbent president, in
1965 and rapidly put a select few "cronies" in
charge of the most important segments of the
economy. All of them, of course, were of Chinese
or mixed-Chinese ancestry, notably Eduardo
"Danding" Cojuangco, the coconut king, and sugar
king Roberto Benedicto
The Chinese
"invasion", however, goes back centuries to an era
when often impoverished Chinese, mostly from the
southeastern region, began arriving in search of
jobs, trade and money. They were often in cahoots
with the Spanish, who ruled the Philippines for
more than 300 years until the Americans drove them
out in 1898. The Americans, as colonialists,
fostered the same comfortable relationships with a
ruling elite dominated by the same wealthy
Filipinos with Chinese and Spanish ancestry.
It was in this cozy environment that
Chinese became the masters of the economy, so much
so that a law banning foreigners from owning
property in the Philippines is really aimed more
at aggressive Chinese than at foreigners from
elsewhere. "Without that law, we would have
Chinese owning all the shops and homes
everywhere," said one Filipino.
As it is,
Chinese have controlled the rice trade since the
Spanish era - and managed to tighten their grip
while Marcos was in power. Chinese control makes
them a target of leftist revolt, as seen in an
attack last weekend in which guerrillas from the
communists' New People's Army torched two trucks
and a shop belonging to a leading rice trader on
Panay island.
The government fears
violence will spread as millions go hungry. To
offset the threat, it recently had to sign another
contract to import 1.5 million tons of rice from
Vietnam, which also has obligations to ship rice
to China and elsewhere. That, however, will not be
enough to cover the total import needs of more
than two million tons, which makes the Philippines
the world’s biggest rice importer.
The
widespread view that Filipino-Chinese merchants,
who are known to control the import and
distribution of rice, are hoarding supplies plays
into the deepest anti-Chinese sentiments of a
country perceived locally to be dominated by "rich
Chinese" in just about every area of business and
finance.
That age-old view gets at the
heart of the complexes of downtrodden Filipinos,
who tend to blame "the Chinese" for all their
problems, professionally and economically. The
fact that millions of Filipinos have Chinese blood
somewhere in their near or distant ancestry hardly
deters them from singling out those more
identifiable as Chinese, from their well-known
monosyllabic names to the owners of vast shopping
centers, hotels, airlines and other big
businesses.
Thus it is that the
agriculture secretary, Arthur Yap, is widely
perceived to be working with the Chinese, even
though Arroyo has "ordered" him to investigate
warehouses, to revoke privileges for traders, and
to follow trucks carrying rice around the country.
"He shall hit the hoarders," as Arroyo put it,
without commenting specifically on their
ethnicity.
Yap, however, has not helped by
suggesting that hungry Filipinos eat less rice. A
lot of people "don't really finish their rice", he
observed, advising fast-food restaurants to serve
half portions. If people would just eat less, he
said, the country could reduce rice imports by
37%, from 1.87 million tons last year to 1.17
tonnes this year.
Inevitably Yap's
off-the-cuff remark prompted criticism from
politicians, to whom the rice crisis is worse than
the headline-grabbing scandal of alleged payoffs
to Arroyo's husband and others for plotting to
skim percentages of contracts, including one for a
broadband infrastructure network tendered to a
Chinese company worth several hundred million
dollars.
The senate president, Manuel
Villar, has accused the government of acting
slowly, and ineffectively, to go after "the rice
cartel". The government, he said, had also failed
to cooperate into investigation of scams for
profiteering off fertilizer, essential to rice
cultivation. "Corruption in areas that directly
affect the poor should never be tolerated," he
said.
Filipinos accustomed to the sight of
well-to-do and middle-class Filipinos gorging
themselves at restaurants far beyond the means of
most citizens complain that Yap has not been seen
in the innumerable shanty towns and rural slums
where the majority of people live. At her food
stand in a Manila suburb, Cora has a much simpler
commentary on Yap's professed desire to stamp out
the hoarders.
"He's a Chinese businessman
himself," she said. "It's only Arroyo who trusts
him. He's working with the Chinese. That's what
everyone says." Indeed, Yap is reportedly the
son-in-law of one of the country's leading rice
traders, a fact that is arousing much criticism
among Filipinos long inured to such conflicts of
interest.
As for Yap's suggestion that
restaurants offer half portions, she responded
plaintively, "Filipinos live on rice." She scoffed
at his observation that people leave rice on the
plate, and pointed out that it clearly was not
made on the basis of meals shared with typical
Filipinos.
Arroyo, visiting Hong Kong in
search of more Chinese foreign investment, said
she hopes rice production will increase by 7% this
year as the government invests in more irrigation
equipment, research and development and seeds. The
government may also move to reduce a tariff of 50%
still imposed on privately imported rice.
Cora, however, does not put much faith in
the government's promises. "The Chinese are buying
projects," she said. "They are generating income
here - and spending it outside."
In the
end, she says, it's only the 10 million or so
Filipinos who work overseas, dutifully sending
remittances back home, who have bailed out the
economy. "They are keeping us alive," she says.
"The Chinese are exploiting us as always."
Journalist Donald Kirk
is a frequent visitor to the Philippines and is
the author of the books Philippines in Crisis: US Power
Versus Local Revolt and Looted: The
Philippines after the Bases.
(Copyright
2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
