Let’s just say, dear blog reader, that you weren’t aware there was a world food crisis. Let’s just say you weren’t aware that there was widespread panic over the soaring price of rice. Self gets hers from Marina Mart in Foster City, where a 30-lb. bag of Jasmine rice from Thailand costs about $10. See, we here in the good ol’ United States are protected from such shocks by the fact that we live in a cushion of prosperity, the world’s richest country, etc etc
This may come as a bit of a shock, but the Philippines is the world’s largest — no, not exporter — importer of rice.
The reason for that is simple: overpopulation, which a succession of Philippine governments has been bemoaning ever since self can remember. When, oh when, will our Catholic leaders realize that preaching abstinence is not going to solve this problem?
Here’s an article from the April 26 issue of The Economist (Self knows: her reading’s backed up again!). The italics are self’s:
The figures put the population at almost 89 million, when the census was taken last August (2007), up from 77 million in 2000. That means it has been growing at just over 2% annually since then. That rate is below the 2.3% annual growth of the 1990s and the 3% of the 1960s. But it is still faster than expected. Some analysts think the census undercounted, especially among poorer Filipinos. The population may now be up to 93 million.
Every hour, then, the country has an extra 200 little mouths to feed. And increasing numbers of them are being born into grinding poverty. Other new government figures show that the number of people scraping by on less than $1 a day has risen by 16% since 2003, to 28 million. More people mean more houses, which means less land to grow crops. The government this month imposed a temporary ban on building on farmland, as it revives its attempt to achieve self-sufficiency in rice.
Some senior officials are pressing President President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to agree to a big expansion of state-provided contraception and other family planning help. But Ms. Arroyo is a devout Catholic and wary of upsetting the influential bishops. She relies on their grudging support to resist pressure for her resignation or ouster, following a plethora of corruption scandals.
And there we go, dear blog readers: providing the domestic servants and musical entertainment of the entire world.
On one of self’s last visits to Bacolod, self was taken by kind uncle to one of her Dear Departed Dad’s haciendas. And she insisted on meeting the workers, who, in that particular hacienda, were all members of the same family: the Anliqueras. Self remembers entering their little nipa huts, and counting on her fingers the number of children each family had, and the average was something like 10. And then she gathered the mothers around and started talking to them about birth control. Meanwhile, her uncle watched, grinning sardonically, somewhere in the background.
When self and uncle returned to his jeep he told self: “Think you’re going to change their minds? After one hour?”
Indeed.
