LOCAL FOOD SECURITY STRATEGY
NEEDED FOR TOWNS, PROVINCES
By Manny Piñol
The rice crisis in the ZAMBASULTA Area (Zamboanga City, Basilan, Sulu and Tawitawi) brought to surface the sad reality that almost all towns and provinces all over the country do not have a local Food Security Plan indicating the food needs of their people and how and where they could produce or where they could source the food.
Heavily dependent on smuggled rice from Sabah, the ZAMBASULTA Area was thrown into a crisis when the Malaysian Government closed its ports in Sandakan and Labuan effectively cutting off rice supply.
The local government units simply had no back-up plan and they never prepared for the eventuality that the smuggling of rice would stop. The whole area could only supply 10% of the consumption requirement of 220,000 metric tons every year.
Learning lessons from the ZAMBASULTA rice crisis, I asked Undersecretary Segfredo Serrano of Policy and Planning and Assistant Secretary for Operations Andrew Villacorta to prepare a localized Food Security Planning program which would look into the needs and the capacity of each province and town to produce food.
Every town and province of the country will be asked by the Department of Agriculture with the help of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) to prepare their local food security plans indicating how they could feed their constituents and what support they need from the national government.
Before the end of this month, all of the country’s Governors and Mayors will be invited by the DA to a one-day forum of four clusters – Northern Luzon, Southern Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao – where they will be asked to submit their local food security plans.
In the official communication which will be sent to DILG Secretary Eduardo Año this week, the DA will ask the Governors and Mayors to provide the following information in their proposed Local Food Security Plan:
1. Total Population of the Town and Province;
2. Total Consumption of basic food commodities like rice or corn in the Eastern Visayan Region, meat, fish and vegetables;
3. Level of self-sufficiency for each of the identified basic food items;
4. Areas for potential food production;
5. Interventions and support they need from the national government like small irrigation, farm to market roads, machinery and equipment, storage and processing facilities;
The DA needs these inputs because there is simply no way for us to determine which river or creek could be the source of water for the local agricultural areas, where would they need roads to transport food commodities and what machinery and other support they need to increase their production.
Based on the Local Food Security Plans to be submitted by each province and town, planning experts of the DA will draft a National Food Security Plan indicating which area has a surplus production of a food commodity and which area needs additional supplies.
The output of this Localized Food Security Planning will be submitted to President Rody Duterte by the end of September so that hopefully, he will be able to prevail upon the government’s economic managers to take a second look at agriculture and food security and its impact on national stability and security.
(Phiippine map downloaded from a public website.)
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