04 July 2008

Philippines: “FIELDS” ushers a field day for seed companies

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In early April, even before the food crisis came to a boil, the Philippine government unveiled its self-sufficiency plan at the National Food Summit. The 84-page document which agriculture secretary Arthur Yap calls “the product of the country's best minds in rice agriculture” puts to work President Arroyo's vision of rice self-sufficiency through FIELDS. The moniker, which implies “more rice fields” stands for Fertiliser, Irrigation, Education and training of farmers, Loans, Dryers and other post-harvest facilities and Seeds of high-yielding hybrid varieties. Some PHP 43 billion (roughly US$ 1 billion) is earmarked for this programme which aims to increase total paddy production to 19.8 million tons by 2010, from the 16.2 million tons in 2007. The breakdown of allocation can be found here where rural credit (US$ 339 million) and subsidies (US$ 208 million) for hybrid seeds take a good chunk of the budget.

For all the hype on FIELDS, however, it is essentially a continuation of past programmes on hybrid rice. It rests on the same philosophy that “self-sufficiency” is having enough supply for the population. By inference, this supports the view that the food crisis is a simple case of shortage, and therefore a mere question of productivity. But alas, nearly everyone now understands that it was a crisis in many respects – of governance, trade policies, fiscal priorities, corporate control and even the “twisted future” promoted by the futures markets – and not just a matter of rice crops failing to convert as much sunlight into starch in the form of rice grains.

Seed subsidy: giving new life to dead seeds?

The more contentious issue with FIELDS is the focus on hybrid seeds, and the subsidy that goes with it. No other than the World Bank and the government's own think-thank, Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) view the seed subsidy as unsustainable. But, with FIELDS, it continues in a major way.

What FIELDS in essence does is integrate and lend more support to the programmes of local governments in the forty-nine provinces that are supposed to contribute 92 percent of the total production target, such as Nueva Ecija, Isabela, Pangasinan, Tarlac, Leyte, Camarines Sur, Iloilo, Cagayan, North Cotabato and Maguindanao. Under FIELDS, governors are delegated as “provincial champions” and tasked to get the programme rolling. But, while it is nice to see the central government finally recognising that “rice self-sufficiency emanates from the provinces”, it sidesteps concrete changes that could have offered immediate impacts at the local level, such as increasing the National Food Authority's (NFA) provincial procurement – a policy change that many farmers say is key to achieving “real” self-sufficiency.

And there are real concerns as to how this dynamic between the central and local governments will play out when it comes to FIELDS' seed agenda. Apart from the seed subsidy that the national government will provide, under FIELDS' provincial governments can further top off these subsidies with their own allocations. In Bohol, the provincial government has come up with its own Rice Accelerated Enhancement Response (RACER) as a FIELDS counterpart. Through RACER, the province is appropriating much of its PHP 13.786 million FIELDS allocation to subsidise farmers with seeds of hybrid rice. The provincial government plans to shoulder the remaining PHP 1,400 (US$ 31) farmers’ equity on top of the Department of Agriculture’s PHP 1,500 (US$ 33) subsidy for for every 20-kg bag of hybrid rice seeds per hectare. This essentially makes hybrid seeds free! All the farmers need to do is plant them! Even some people at PHILRICE, DA's lead institution in implementing FIELDS, admit that this may happen, but that they have no control over it. In fact, the national government seems to have no control at all as to how hybrid seeds will be distributed and promoted in the provinces.

Under the FIELDS programme, the seeds to be promoted are a combination of publicly developed hybrids such as M1, M3, M7 developed by PHILRICE, as well as privately developed hybrids like Bigante (Bayer), SL-8 (SL Agritech), Rizalina 28 (HyRice) and Bioseed 401 (Bioseed). The seed companies who will be supplying these seeds must now be jumping with glee, especially SL Agritech who has already cornered much of the hybrid rice seed market through the previous subsidy programmes.

“We are alarmed over this development” says Wilhelmina Pelegrina of SEARICE, a non-government organization working on conservation and development of local seeds with Bohol’s farming communities. “Providing input subsidies for hybrid rice is not a sustainable solution to achieve rice self-sufficiency and address the rice crisis” she said. Since 2005, SEARICE has criticized the government subsidy on hybrid rice citing its failure to convince farmers to adopt the technology despite the massive subsidies and promotion of hybrid rice. In 2004-2005 alone, SEARICE found that 50-99 percent of the government's farmer adoptors stopped using hybrid rice.

SEARICE is not alone with its misgivings. Both the National Rice Farmers Council and Centro Saka, a farmer-based policy research NGO, allege that the FIELDS programme will “merely perpetuate the misguided strategies that have turned the Philippines into the world’s biggest rice importer” citing the poor performance of the government's current hybrid rice program and the corruption issues that haunt it.

The quality of these subsidised seeds is also a central issue. Although there's the National Seed Certification and Quality Services (NSQCS) agency that is responsible for ensuring the quality of hybrid seeds being sold to farmers, in reality there is little quality assurance for farmers. A SEARICE study found that the same varieties being promoted under FIELDS have already produced big failures in farmers' fields because of their poor quality. Another study by Kristina David of PIDS found that hybrid seeds were distributed without meeting the standards set by the National Seed Industry Council (NSIC). Yet another report, this time by the government's Commission on Audit (COA) in 2005 , listed the poor quality of seeds among a range of factors hampering the governmment's hybrid rice programme.

Interestingly, the COA report further touches on other problems with the hybrid rice programme: “In nine (9) out of fourteen (14) regions it was gathered that failure to provide adequate technical assistance on hybrid farming techniques, and to immediately attend to the problems of the farmers on the delay/inadequate supply of hybrid seeds, poor quality seeds, high cost of fertilizer, leaf disease and inadequate supply of Bacteria Leaf Blight (BLB) contributed to high production costs and lesser yields than expected, dissipating the objectives of the GMA Hybrid Rice Program. In this program, unaccounted hybrid seeds worth P8.80 million and fertilizer coupons / discounts denied by the farmers were noted in certain regions.”

According to the Farmers Council, the proposed allocation for seed subsidy “will simply amount to subsidising big seed companies like SL-Agritech, Bayer and Monsanto.” Early last year, the Council estimated that SL Agritech may have already pocketed some PHP 208 million (US$ 4.3 million) from the government's subsidy scheme. “The design of the FIELDS interventions will actually make the rice program dependent on private companies with no accountability to the public,” said the Council's leader Jaime Tadeo.

More of the private sector

From the very beginning, the government has its interventions in the rice seed market as a way to put seed companies more firmly in control. At the third national workshop on hybrid rice in June 2005, the government made it very clear that its goal was to have the private sector in charge of hybrid rice commercialization by 2010. “The private sector must play a greater role in the commercialisation of the technology while the government makes the policy environment conducive for the private sector to do its business,” according to said workshop report. It also states that “efforts at encouraging the participation of private seed companies should continue, not only in hybrid rice seed production and marketing, but also in R&D activities for the development of new hybrids.”

The same thinking is shared by the new Hybrid Rice Research and Development Consortium (HRDC) that IRRI is leading. It is no surprise that the Department of Agriculture signed a cooperation agreement with IRRI to beef up research and production of new generations of high yielding varieties of rice for the FIELDS programme. The two institutions will collaborate on long-term breeding by establishing a joint lRRI-PHILRICE breeding program for developing the next generation of high-yielding rice varieties and hybrids, and in accelerating the development and deployment of these rice seeds.

This calls back into question the hybrid rice consortium, which gives private companies not only privileged access to publicly held germplasm but also to commercialise publicly developed hybrid rice lines. It is a clear example of a free ride. Public money will be used to develop hybrid rice lines that would be commercialised later by private seed companies, which will be bought by the same government through the seed subsidy component of FIELDS. At the consortium's website, IRRI is calling on all interested parties to procure three of its new hybrid lines! Why would SL Agritech or Bayer need to spend on hybrid rice RnD if they can just purchase lines from IRRI or Philrice? Indeed, it would be interesting to know in the coming months how much of the US$ 1 billion FIELDS budget will roll down the corporate pockets of these lucky seed companies.

Beyond FIELDS, the private sector is definitely going to cash in on “solving” the food crisis. Already, San Miguel Corporation and Malaysia’s Kuok Group announced plans to bankroll (yet another) US$ 1 billion to develop a million hectares of public land to help boost production of rice in the Philippines. The initiative is considered the biggest private corporate response to food crisis in the Philippines.

Beating the population fall guy

The rice self-sufficiency issue has a long history in the Philippines. The Philippines has been importing rice since the 1960s, with the single exception of 1979. It is not because of lack of land or productivity. Even at the height of the country's green revolution programme, known as Masagana 99 – where Marcos had to borrow money from IMF-World Bank to finance the programme – much of the rice lands had to be converted for other uses, among them plantations for growing export crops. The Philippines abandoned its efforts to secure sufficient rice production (and rely on imports instead to fill up its buffer stock) so that it could shift to growing more lucrative export crops such as cut flowers, asparagus, etc. in order to repay its loans to the IMF-World Bank. It wasn't like the country was given a choice; the shift was a precondition of the loans. As a result, the Philippines remained a net importer of 5-10% of its rice requirements from countries like India and Vietnam.

The government has also failed miserably to live up to its longstanding promises for agrarian reform. Up to this moment, 60 percent of its farmers have no land of their own. Yet, just last month, it was negotiating with the government of Bahrain to invest in rice farmland in the Philippines in a move to boost Bahrain's own food security. Agriculture ministers of both countries are said to have already agreed on the idea and will soon reveal the official deal. "Bahrain needs food security, particularly rice, and the Philippines needs investment and both parties are keen to see this deal happening," said one Bahrain-based importer. While the government of the Philippines struggles to find suppliers of rice for its own people, at the same time they are negotiating away farmlands to produce rice for Bahrain!

What we've been hearing from farmers in the Philippines is loud and clear: to stop the food crisis you have to redistribute lands to their legitimate tillers and abolish any existing forms of serfdom, tenancy, or other feudal relationships that stand in the way of sovereign food production. The poverty and powerlessness of the majority of the country's food producers is at the root of this food crisis. It is social and political in nature, and requires social and political solutions. Anything less is injustice. FIELDS, in this light, will be just another policy failure.

23 June 2008

Bangladesh: When seed companies dictate ag policies

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Earlier this month the government of Bangladesh announced a large increase in the amount of hybrid rice seed that would be allowed to be imported. If this 11,500 tonnes of seed is imported and sown in farmers' fields, it will cover between 1.2-1.5 million hectares-- about 30% of the entire rice crop. The government says the move is designed to secure the coutnry's food security, but, in a new report, the non-governmental organisation (NGO) UBINIG says that the government is merely pandering to the interests of the seed companies and, what is worse, putting the country's food supply at risk with an unproven technology.

The UBINIG report charges that the government did not investigate last year's experiences with its large-scale promotion of hybrid rice before deciding to increase the seed imports. Through its own research, UBINIG found that in the last boro rice growing season bacterial leaf blight emerged in an epidemic form in the areas where hybrid rice was grown and that the hybrid rice varieties appeared to be more susceptible to the disease than the local varieties. Experts interviewed by the NGO
said that the low quality of the hybrid rice seeds and the imbalance of fertility of the soil were major causes of the disease outbreaks and urged the Government to compel the seed companies to pay proper compensation to the affected farmers.

The imported hybrid rice seeds cost three times more than conventional varieties and just a few companies are registered for permission to import these seeds. They include Supreme Seed Company, ACI Seed, Syngenta and the micro-credit NGO BRAC.

UBINIG is now calling for the aggressive commercialisation and promotion of hybrid rice to be stopped immediately and for the government to conduct a thorough environmental, ecological and economic performance evaluation of hybrid rice.

"It is clear that aggressive promotion of Hybrid rice is not based on its yield potential as it is often claimed, but purely geared to create a hybrid seed market controlled by a few companies," says UBINIG. "Hybrid seed companies supported by a few NGOs are literally dictating the Ministry of Agriculture."

"Tall claims" about hybrid rice in India

Meanwhile, next door in India, hybrid rice is also coming up well short of seed company promises.  Amrita Chaudhry, writing for Expressindia, reports on how the efforts of the Punjab State government to promote cultivation of hybrid rice are falling apart as "the farmers have found that these 'so-called' high-yielding varieties are actually giving a harvest much less than the conventional ones."

She says that the "tall claims on yield potential made by the companies have not translated on the fields."

According to Surinder Singh, who owns Brar Seed Farm, next to Punjab Agricultural University, “Hybrid rice was quite popular in Punjab at one time. We sold 40 to 50 quintals of hybrid rice seed each year. However, over the last few years, claims of a yield of 35 to 40 quintal per hectare have fallen flat.”

“We sell the Monsanto varieties of hybrid rice seeds and going by the response from the farmers, we will not be able to see more than 4 quintals of seed this season,” says Brar.

“The yield of hybrid rice is on a par with that of the normal varieties," says Balwant Singh, a farmer from Khanna, Punjab. "So rather than buying the expensive hybrid seed that costs Rs 200 per kg, we prefer the PAU 201 [conventional variety] that costs Rs 20 per kg.”

27 May 2008

Papua New Guinea: mining ushers hybrid rice growing in the Ramu valley

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The Ramu Valley in Papua New Guinea (PNG) is not the kind of place where you would expect to find fields of hybrid rice. The people there, much like the rest of PNG, have no tradition of growing or eating rice. But last year some local communities in Ramu, as well as Usino/Bundi and parts of the Raicoast areas of Madang Province, started planting hybrid rice seeds imported from China. The reason? A Chinese-owned mining company, Ramu Nico Management Limited, which is in charge of the massive Ramu Nickel Project, introduced the hybrid rice cultivation to villagers in the mining impact areas to supply its Chinese work force.

By way of Ramu Nico's assistance, villagers of the Kurumbukari special mining lease are currently into large-scale rice farming using hybrid rice. Ramu Nico has reportedly assisted a total of 33 farmers in the Kurumbukari area with bags of hybrid rice seeds. The company is also reportedly going to build a rice mill for the farmers. Since the Nickel Project started operation, Ramu Nico has built a road and helped landowners to cultivate rice in large quantities to supply the mine.

"I know Chinese eat a lot of rice. That is why I want to plant more rice and sell to them," says Tuma Rugei, a farmer from Danagari village.

Danagari and Miavi are two of the relocation centres where families displaced from the mine are encouraged to grow hybrid rice to sell directly to the miners. Hao Zhaochun, assistant manager of Ramu Nico, said this rice growing initiative is meant to sustain the livelihoods of the displaced families while the mine is in operation. The Ramu Nickel Project supposedly will have a lifespan of more than 40 years. This early, there are suspicions whether the initiative is a genuine goodwill project, or just a scheme to justify more local displacement.

Lately, it seems that hybrid rice seeds and technical assistance are not the only ones coming in to PNG as a result of its bilateral cooperation with China. Illegal Chinese immigrants are also reported to be entering Papua New Guinea for work at the Ramu Nickel Mine. A Raicoast member of the parliament, Niuro Toko Sapia, reveals that the ships coming from China – carrying equipment for the mine – reportedly go straight to Basamuk Bay where the illegal migrants are off-loaded in large shipping containers.  He says these illegal migrants are pushing local landowners out of job opportunities at the mine.

Messing with local food culture

Monoculture is not the traditional way of farming in PNG. The Ramu Valley communities are primarily subsistence famers, which means the core purpose of crop cultivation is to support their food needs and livelihoods using local species that have cultural and traditional significance. Subsistence farmers in PNG enjoy the variety and diversity of food crops that suits the conditions of the tropical climate, seasons, soil types and vegetation. These include such crops as taro, bananas, sago, yam and sweet potatoes.

“With the hybrid rice project, the locals are forced into a new culture of cash crop farming completely at odds with their traditional practices and food system. To the locals, rice can thus pose a real threat to their local crops and culture,” according to Steven Sukot of the Bismarck Ramu Group in the Madang Province.

However, the consumption of rice has been gaining ground on the island in recent years. According to Adam Bande, a rice specialist who also coordinates the rice project in Kurumbukari, rice is now a staple part of the PNG diet which makes the country a regular importer because of the high demand. A typical family unit now supposedly consumes about 158 kg annually.

Bande thinks that PNG can supply its own rice needs. "Every year PNG imports around 203,000 tonnes of rice worth K56 million (US$ 21,279,832). This amount of rice can be grown here in PNG as there are large areas of arable land available and we are capable of producing up to 5 tonnes per hectare if these lands are being utilized," he says.

Bande was referring to the lands at Kurumbukari that are going to be grown with hybrid rice. But there is also a larger 10-year Domestic Rice Development Policy that was approved by the National Executive Council in 2005. The policy aims to establish “a sustainable domestic rice industry that would enhance household food security and nutrition, generate cash income for farmers, and reduce dependence on imported rice.”

Cash crop for export?

In the last decade, other big investments have crept into the valley, harnessed by the government's Medium Term Development Strategy 2005-2010, an export-driven policy that outlines the overarching plan for economic and social development in PNG.

Right now, the hybrid rice growing seems to be entirely limited for the mine workers at Ramu Nickel Project. But given the recent surge in global rice price, PNG could easily become another venue for countries like China to outsource the production of rice for export back home.


Steven Sukot provided much of ground research for this piece.

12 May 2008

The food crisis and the hybrid rice surge

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A few years ago, hybrid rice looked like just another pipe dream. Despite the fanfare about through-the-roof yields, three decades of subsidies and research had failed miserably to bring hybrid rice into mass production outside of China. But the potential profits from the technology are huge. Hybrid rice seeds cannot be saved from the harvest, so farmers have to buy new seed every year. In this sense, hybrid rice is the key to building a corporate-controlled rice market, something that hardly exists in comparison with a crop like maize. Interest in the development of hybrid rice has thus never subsided and, in reality it has always been silently moving forward. Now, with the world in a major rice crisis, hybrid rice is being presented as the logical solution to boost national production the world over. The consequences of such a sudden and largescale shift from conventional rice to corporate-friendly hybrids would be devastating for small farmers -- and the future of world rice production.

Last week the Philippines Department of Agriculture signed an agreement with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) that is supposed to boost rice productivity and achieve rice self-sufficiency in the country by 2010. A cornerstone of this programme is a $216 million project for the production and distribution of subsidised hybrid and certified seeds (which comes out of the budget of the government's larger FIELDS initiative). The target is to triple the number of hectares under hybrid rice cultivation to 900,000 hectares by the 2009-2010 season.

“We find this difficult to understand given the poor performance of the hybrid rice program and the many issues that have been raised against it over the years,” said Centro Saka executive director Omi Royandoyan and National Rice Farmers Council president Jimmy Tadeo. "The package is no different from those that have turned us into the world’s biggest rice importer. By subsidizing hybrid rice, we are subsidizing big seed companies like SL-Agritech, Bayer and Monsanto, when we should be using that money to support our own rice farmers. FIELDS will actually make us dependent on private companies that are not accountable to the public," they added.

The main beneficiary of the various hybrid rice schemes that the Philippines has pursued over the past decade is SL Agritech, owned by Filipino-Chinese businessman Henry Lim (see side photo).  In 2006, SL Agritech accounted for 65% of the hybrid rice seeds supplied under the country's hybrid rice programme-- earning the company over $4 million, according to some farmers' organisations. Lim argues that farmers can become millionaires by converting to hybrid rice.  “Better earnings will allow rice farmers to expand their areas and also become millionaires,” he told the Manila Times.

The few studies that have been done on the experience of hybrid rice in the Philippines paint a very different picture. Official statistics from 2003 for one town in Isabela Province, northwest of the country, show that for every hectare of hybrid rice that yielded above the national average for conventional inbred varieties, currently pegged at 4.2 mt/ha, seven hectares of the same variety yielded miserably below it. More recently, in 2007, the World Bank concluded that the Philippines' hybrid rice programmes have not produced "much net social benefit," noting a farmer drop-out rate from the programme of 50 to 99 percent. The Bank said that the conventional varieties were more "socially profitable" than the hybrids.

With the current rice crisis, the stakes are now much higher for the government's rice policy. Choosing to plow forward with IRRI on a hybrid rice programme that has so far failed is a huge gamble. But it is one that other governments are also being persuaded to take.

Indonesia, for instance, says it will spend $651 million this year to provide farmers with rice seeds, including high-yielding hybrid varieties, to boost production. Last year the government launched a programme to distribute 2,000 tons of free hybrid rice seed to farmers to be planted on over 135,000 ha of prime rice land, even though local studies did not find that hybrid rice improved production and an initial pilot programme produced disastrous results for participating farmers. (CNN recently produced a video report on hybrid rice in Indonesia, here).

This renewed drive for hybrid rice is in many ways fueled by China. On the one hand, China is focusing on hybrid rice as a way to develop its own multinational seed corporations. Much of the hybrid rice seed sold in Asia is imported from Chinese companies. The Indonesian government admits that over half of its seed needs for its hybrid rice programme will be imported from China. Bangladesh and Pakistan import the majority of their hybrid rice seeds from China, as does Burma. Vietnam has invested heavily in developing a national hybrid rice seed industry, but it too imports most of its hybrid rice seeds from China.

The Chinese seed companies not only have access to the varieties developed over decades by China's public breeding programmes, but China also provides the right climatic conditions and a cheap labour force necessary for making hybrid rice seed production economical. The giant multinational seed companies, like Syngenta and Bayer, are thus ramping up their investments in the Chinese seed industry, even though, under Chinese law they are restricted to a 49% stake. In 2007, the world's fourth largest seed company, Vilmorin/Limagrain of France, took a 46.5% stake in China's largest hybrid rice seed company, Yuan Longping Hi-tech Agriculture.

But for China, the hybrid rice gambit is not just about seeds. The Chinese government is interested in expanding its overall control of rice production beyond its borders, both to secure national rice supplies and to feed its growing teams of Chinese labourers working for national companies on mining, oil and infrastructure projects around the world. Beijing is currently considering a proposal drafted by the Ministry of Agriculture that would make supporting offshore land acquisition by Chinese agribusiness a central government policy.

Burma is one country that has been a focus for the outsourcing of hybrid rice production by Chinese business, with the support of the military junta. In an August 2007 exposé of the hybrid rice programme in Northern Burma, near the Chinese border, freelance journalist Clifford McCoy describes how four consecutive years of poor harvests with Chinese hybrid rice varieties have driven many ethnic-minority farmers into heavy debt or out of rice farming. "After successive bad harvests and lacking the funds to service their debts, many farmers have been forced to sell their land, in many instances to the same Chinese business people who sold them the seeds, fertilizers and pesticides," says Clifford. "Farmers who cannot afford to pay off their debts incurred from the now higher costs of growing [hybrid] rice often end up selling their land to the same Chinese companies that sell the farming inputs. The companies then frequently turn the land into commercial rice farms." 

Télécharger ici (WMV)

Similar scenarios are playing out much further from China's borders. On April 30, 2008, France's TF1 television news reported on a Chinese effort to outsource rice production to Africa (see video above). The news report investigated a 10,000 hectare project in Cameroon, managed by a Chinese company, which, through an agreement with the Cameroonian government, is producing rice for export to China. During the 2006 Africa-China Summit, China agreed to establish 10 agricultural centres on the African continent and delegations of Chinese rice experts and businessmen have already been in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique to begin projects for the production of Chinese hybrid rice varieties.

This year China's Chongqing Seed Corp announced that it had selected 300 hectares of land for production of its hybrid rice in Tanzania, beginning next year. The company says it will be contracting out production to local farmers and exporting the harvest to China. Chongqing began similar projects in Nigeria and Laos a couple years ago, but already it says it will be shelving the Laos project. 

"The system there doesn't have any leverage over farmers, so labour is not very efficient. But we can't send Chinese workers to plant there [Laos]," the company's deputy general manager Huang Zhonglun told Reuters. "They charge a lot for land rent, and there's no irrigation infrastructure so we have to rely on the rainy season."

Other foreign hybrid rice ventures by Chinese companies include Suntime International's 5,000 hectare project in Cuba and a 1,050 hectare project in Mexico. The China Daily reports that a company from Heilongjiang has a 42,000 hectare hybrid rice project in the Far East of Russia.

Some Chinese officials do question the wisdom of this outsourcing policy. "It is not realistic to grow grains overseas, particularly in Africa or South America," says Xie Guoli, deputy director of the agricultural trade promotion center at the Ministry of Agriculture. "There are so many people starving in Africa, can you ship the grains back to China?"

China, however, is not alone in its outsourcing ambitions. On May 11, the Financial Times reports that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government and other private entities have bought as much as 800,000 hectares of land in Pakistan, primarily for the production of wheat and rice to be exported to the UAE. Vietnam is beginning to look to Africa for the outsourcing of rice production too-- to make up for the 500,000 hectares in rice lands it has lost since 2001 to urbanisation and industrial development. A team of Vietnamese scientists led by Professor Vo Tong Xuan, rector of An Giang University, has been in Sierra Leone since at least 2007 to test the productivity of 50 Vietnamese varieties. Later this year, 20 Vietnamese farmers from the Mekong Delta will go to Sierra Leone to train local farmers on Vietnamese rice farming techniques. According to the website of the Government of Sierra Leone, 300,000 to 1 million hectares of land have been reserved for this "co-operation" project with Vietnam.

Xuan, who is also the senior advisor to one of Vietnam's leading rice companies, Minh Cat Tan Company Ltd., says that, under the project, a stock company will be set up that will also look to replicate the model in other countries. He says that Vietnam is expected to become Sierra Leone’s main supplier of rice seeds in the future.

Who supplies what seed is the big question in all the current talk about getting "quality" seed to farmers to increase production to fend off the growing food crisis. How much of this seed is going to be imported? Will they be GMOs? Traditional materials? Hybrids? The glaring difference between hybrid and conventional rice is that hybrid rice seeds are supplied almost exclusively by private seed companies. The whole logic of hybrids is none other than to make the business profitable for corporations. As if proof were needed of this, the door to a public hybrid rice seed supply was slammed shut last month when IRRI, which runs the only significant public hybrid rice breeding programme outside of China, announced the formation of its Hybrid Rice Research and Development Consortium. The Consortium will bring together private seed companies to bid on the exclusive rights to IRRI's hybrid lines. The stage is thus set for a small number of multinational seed companies to take control of the global hybrid rice seed supply, just as they have with most of the world's other major crops.

With the food crisis and this renewed push for hybrid rice, the world is moving to an entirely new situation where large parts of its rice land will be planted with seeds sold by private seed companies and, in many cases, imported from zones of cheap hybrid rice seed production, notably China and India. And this shift to hybrid rice seeds is facilitating a shift to corporate farming, with companies either pursuing vertically-integrated contract production or taking direct control over land and farming, with the collusion of governments.

One lesson that should be learned from this rice crisis is that dependence breeds disaster. Those countries suffering most from the current rice crisis are those that abandoned local rice production and became dependent on imports. Today, four billion people are struggling to get enough food to eat because they cannot pay the price for rice, along with other basic staples, that the global market imposes on them. Meanwhile the corporations that have inserted themselves into a position of control in the global food system are reaping record profits. With the food crisis providing a red carpet to push hybrid rice, dependency will be created at an even more fundamental level: the seed, the most basic element of food production. It is a recipe for another food crisis: not one based on access to food, but access to the means to produce food.

22 April 2008

Philippines and beyond: rice crisis – reaping the 'fruit' of market capitalism

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The recent price hike in rice has caused many people, from Asia to Africa, to panic. Expectedly, perhaps, as more than half of the world's population depend on rice for food, most of them the poorest of the poor. In the Philippines alone, the 'shortage' triggered daily long queues of low-income people in different parts of Metro Manila desperate to buy a few kilos of subsidised imported rice, rationed by the government's National Food Authority. The price of commercial rice was high enough to affect even the middle class. The purported reason: short supply in the market.

However, the situation comes perfectly incongruent with the FAO prediction 20 days ago of global production increases, further harbouring suspicion among people whether the short supply is real or simply imagined. According to FAO, global rice production is expected to increase by an additional 12 million tonnes this year in all the major Asian rice-producing countries. Grain production in 2007 was a hefty 2.3 billion tons.

Some point to inflation as the real cause of the crisis, emphasising the role of a plummeting dollar in an ever-fluid free market. Indeed the devaluing dollar, still the world's reserve currency, is partly causing the price, not only of rice but practically everything, to skyrocket. The oil price is constantly rising, making all petroleum dependent production and distribution of goods and services expensive. A ton of rice sold at US$ 500 in January now fetches around US$ 1,200.

But all of this is just a sign of an inherent crisis – that of market capitalism and trade liberalisation policies that many developing countries reliant on foreign debt are forced to accept. The Philippines is a good example of a country that was pushed to ignore its own food production and liberalise its industries, including rice, in order to comply with its many commitments, such as the IMF-WB's structural adjustment programmes, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, and FTAs with several countries. An inevitable consequence of liberalising the rice industry is its vulnerability to currency fluctuation and supply-demand manipulation. To be continuously dependent on rice imports especially while the dollar performs badly, is a perfect recipe for crisis.

In the past days, government agents were quick to barge into rice traders' warehouses – often stacked to the roof – and suspect them of hoarding. But there seems to be more logic in what some traders say, than with what the government suspects. “We are stocking rice so that people will have something to buy and eat during the lean months of July-August,” according to a rice trader in Cebu. The current government, as well as those of past administrations, regularly boast about cracking the rice cartel, but never with much impact. In any case, this suspected "hoarding" pales in comparison to what's happening at the international level. The Philippines couldn't fill its latest import tender for rice because the traders were asking for twice the already inflated prices of rice in March. "The prices are just too high," said Vic Jarina, the deputy director of the Philippines National Food Authority.

This is what happens when governments give up and liberalise, rather than tighten, control over the rice industry. The private hands are given more room to play and manipulate the game to their liking.

But it's not just the warehouse that's becoming privatised under liberalisation. Across the globe, the whole agricultural system is becoming privatised. The world's rice production, dependent on private seed and agrochemical companies, is one of the biggest industrial monocultures primarily traded by private companies in the world market. Currency fluctuation, fertilizer price spikes, oil price increases – all this makes rice, considered a political commodity, also a highly vulnerable traded good.

Just a week ago, a large contingent of farmers, joined in by 16 foreign participants from different farmers organisations and NGOs in several Asian countries, gathered in the streets of Jakarta for the culmination of a week of rice action. They had just wrapped-up activities celebrating the various initiatives of Asian farmers in securing more sustainable rice farming and production systems. They called on the government to pay attention to the importance of food sovereignty in the equitable distribution of goods. They emphasised the problems with liberalising the rice industry and the dangers of being dependent on rice imports. They criticised the inherent flaw of an agricultural production system that is reliant on seed and chemical inputs from transnational companies. In short, they were there exposing the root causes of the rice crisis, and offering solutions.

Their calls sadly fell on deaf ears. Moreover, the foreign participants, who were there in solidarity with the Indonesian farmers, were arrested and detained. In the Philippines, several farmer and peasant groups have been coming up with proposals too. The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, for example, points to several solutions: an increase by at least 25 percent in the NFA's local paddy procurement; scrapping of the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act and WTO's agricultural liberalisation; stopping land use and crop conversions; implementation of genuine agrarian reform.

But so far the governments of the Philippines and Indonesia have not showed any signs that they are listening, preferring instead to turn to the very agents who led them into this mess and who continue to push the very same mantras of neo-liberalism and green revolution technologies.

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