When Farmers Become Victims of Low Tariffs

Situated in the Mindanao River basin, Kabacan must contend with both drought and flooding. The area is laced with waterways and sits low, plagued by inundation year after year. Reports indicate that last July’s floods affected 5,185 households and submerged more than 15,000 mu of farmland across Kabacan.

After the visit to the municipal government, Robin took us to Barangay Cuyapon, one of the city’s constituent villages. He told us that the 15,000 mu of flooded farmland included parts of Barangay Cuyapon and its neighbouring village. Yields from waterlogged paddies dropped sharply, leaving local officials at their wits’ end.

II. Essential Demand, Soaring Prices — Who Profits?

I shook my head. Robin went on to explain that “unli” is short for the English word “unlimited”, so “unli rice” means unlimited rice. “When we go to a restaurant, we eat more rice than we would at home — just to get our money’s worth. We Filipinos love rice so much that we could eat it every single meal without ever growing tired of it.”

Data shows that in 2023, per capita rice consumption in the Philippines reached 151.3 kilograms — more than twice the per capita figure for China in the same period. Philip C. C. Huang and other scholars argue that China has undergone a “hidden agricultural revolution” since the 1980s, driven directly by a transformation in food consumption patterns: as incomes have risen, the ratio of grain, vegetable, and meat consumption among Chinese households has shifted from 8:1:1 to 4:3:3. In simple terms, people are eating less and less staple grain.

In the Philippines, however, rice remains the first choice for filling the belly. According to the Department of Agriculture, spending on rice accounts for nearly 10% of the average Filipino household budget — a figure that can reach 20% for poorer families.

In a report, the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) analysed that the lowest-income groups consume 7.1 kilograms more rice per person per year than the highest-income groups, while rural residents consume 11.47 kilograms more than urban dwellers. The poorer the Filipino, the harder it is to do without rice — and that, perhaps, is another dimension of what “unli rice” truly means.

Events have unfolded in complete contradiction to the government’s plans. In January this year, the average price of both imported and domestically grown rice in Metro Manila exceeded 55 pesos per kilogram (equivalent to RMB 7.20 per kilogram). The Department of Agriculture declared a food security emergency, pledged to release rice from national reserves, and approved a price cap on imported rice.

With supply on the rise, why have prices gone up rather than down? The textbook supply-and-demand curve has clearly failed to account for the complexities of reality.

Middlemen serve as the bridge connecting farmers and consumers, yet as market players they also profit handsomely from rice trading. The Free Farmers Federation (FFF) has pointed out that with ever-widening margins between wholesale and retail, middlemen are the greatest beneficiaries of the Rice Tariffication Law, pocketing most of the gains from cheap imported rice.

In February this year, Bulacan province, immediately adjacent to Manila, was rocked by a fraud scandal in which aged rice was mixed with imported rice and sold under “fresh rice” labels.

On top of the regulatory vacuum, collusion between government and business has only deepened the chaos. In February 2024, the National Food Authority sold rice that should have been held as part of the national reserve to private firms at 25 pesos per kilogram. When the scandal broke, more than 100 officials were implicated and suspended. Incidents of this kind have kept the NFA among the most corrupt government agencies in the Philippines for years.

III. Food Security and Food Sovereignty

Bello argues that it is the ever-intensifying liberalisation of the rice trade that lies at the root of the food crisis. The Rice Tariffication Law is tantamount to a death sentence for Philippine rice agriculture, as domestic rice simply cannot compete fairly with heavily subsidised imports from Vietnam and Thailand. Left unchecked, this will deal a devastating blow to smallholders in the long run.

He has urged the Philippine government to reopen relevant trade negotiations and curb the dumping of foreign agricultural products. At the same time, he says, the government must deepen land reform, increase agricultural investment, improve rural infrastructure such as irrigation and roads, and tangibly support smallholders’ motivation to produce.

Well before the long policy shift, numerous rural development organisations across the Philippines had already been empowering smallholders — the Southeast Asian Community Empowerment Initiative (SEARICE) among them.

Since its founding in 1977, SEARICE has been supporting farmers in collecting landrace varieties and breeding new ones, promoting the exchange of agroecological techniques, and reducing farmers’ dependence on commercial seeds and agricultural inputs, so that they can reclaim autonomy over production at its most fundamental level.

On 8 April, we had the privilege of visiting Eddie Sasi, a farmer-breeder who has collaborated with SEARICE for twenty-two years. Now 65, Eddie lives with his family in the countryside of President Roxas, Mindanao, farming 30 mu of paddy fields without a single chemical input. Rice paddies, fruit trees, vegetables, and a fish pond are laid out in an elegant patchwork, forming a small self-sustaining cycle.

“When the summer fruits are ripe, come and visit! You can eat as much as you like — for free! But if you want to take any home, that’ll cost you!” Overcome with enthusiasm, Eddie warmly invited us. Thirty mu of diversified planting provide his family with wholesome food; not only do they need to buy nothing from outside, he can even sell surplus fruit and vegetables to his neighbours in the village. This state of food autonomy and self-sufficiency left his visiting companions positively envious.

Yet this is far from the norm among Filipino smallholders. Take rice, for example: the Philippines has 1.1 million small-scale rice farmers and farm workers who cultivate no more than 15 mu, most of whom are rice “net consumers”. Robin told me that some farmers choose to plant high-yielding varieties; after selling their freshly harvested rice at the season’s peak, they then head back to the market to buy rice with a better taste and texture. For them, the price swings of the past year have been nothing short of a devastating blow.

For Eddie, choosing which rice variety to grow is not an either-or proposition. Through training at SEARICE’s Farmer Field School, he has become adept at plant breeding. High yielding, good taste, early maturing, disease resistant — whatever combination of traits he wants, he simply attempts to breed for it, without having to rely on market varieties.

The SEARICE seed bank, just a few kilometres away, gives Eddie ready access. It houses over 800 traditional rice varieties and more than 300 new varieties developed by farmer-breeders. Any farming household partnering with SEARICE can apply to trial-grow and breed varieties on demand. This year, Eddie’s farm is running adaptability trials on 11 upland rice varieties. If they grow well, they can be put into cultivation or incorporated into breeding programmes.