Why is an agricultural country like the Philippines now importing rice and fish?

[Public post by Facebook user Benedict Exconde]

Four things:

1. Basic supply and demand. If your country has 100 million (and increasing, no thanks to Roman Catholic Church meddling, lobbying and politicking) mouths to feed and your local food production cannot keep up with demand, how do you plan to address the supply gap?

2. All administrations between Marcos and Duterte did not give value to agriculture and fisheries as important elements of the economy and national security (i.e., food security). They wanted agrarian communities to do away with agriculture and become laborers in the manufacturing and service sectors, which are controlled by the ruling class, with the "pro-masses" Maoists getting regular payola from them. The failure of these administrations to come up with a comprehensive long-term national food security and rural development plan and their sheer lack of regard to agrarian communities brought us to where we are now, a clusterfuck that Duterte himself is having difficulty to solve

3. The reality is that consumers do not care where their food comes from. All they care about is having readily available, high quality and affordable food choices. With the economies of the world now interconnected to each other and incomes apparently growing, expect consumers to exercise the power of choice- and governments, including that of the Philippines, should recognize that

4. To protect the welfare and interests of farmers and fishermen, and consumers, the opportunists in the middle of the value chain, and their enablers and protectors should be annihilated, while there must be a way to link farmers and fishermen, and consumers more directly without the need to go through a lot of middlemen.