By: DONALD SEVILLA
FOOD INSUFFICIENCY
Our country is blessed as we are rich in natural resources. Bohol is no exception as we are, too.
We have beautiful white sandy beaches, lush green forests and ricefields. We arte the breadbasket of the Visayas and during the war- torn years, we survived as we were self-sufficient.
People from oher places fled to our shores and sought refuge here. We didn’t rely on imports from our neighboring provinces and we made ends meet. But can we say the same today?
If war were to break out now, can we survive on our own to feed ourselves without any outside help?
Having gone through a long drought, our food production has considerably dropped. Not only us here, but the whole country suffered from the ill effects of El Nino.
Luckily, unlike our brethren from the metro where everything is sourced from the outside and bought, we still can get by.
But if we are to examine things closely, we are teetering on the brink of the abyss. An increase in population, one too many, and we could suffer the fate of our brothers in the big cities.
Battered by the lack of economic opportunities that hinder our financial capability, our lives are made more difficult. But for us living in the provinces, “we can go home and plant camote”, an idiomatic expression which suggests, we can always find alternative sources of food better than everyone else, just to survive.
Yet over time, our lack of foresight and planning has been detrimental to our well- being. We suffer from the high prices of just about everything and worse, from the lack of supply of basic food items. We don’t grow enough vegetables that we have to source it from as far as Bukidnon in Mindanao.
In other words we no longer produce food in excess, more than enough to feed ourselves. This scenario is trùe to the entire country, where before we could export rice, now we have become one of the world’s top importers of the commodity.
So, why are we no longer self-sufficient? Why are we not producing enough for ourselves?
The culprit lies in our agricultural policies and strategies that need to be reviewed and updated for its effectiveness.
We are no longer self-reliant because our people in government spend endless time on meetings and seminars without taking concrete steps to address the problem. We are good in theory but not in practice. We do not give adequate support to our agriculture and people’s livelihood and we have not set the right priorities .
Yet, we need not look far beyond our backyard to see this. Rather, than be entertained and focus on basketball tournaments, beauty pageants and what have we, couldn’t we be better off putting our resources to improving farm and fishery inputs?
What have we done to support our farmers and fisherfolk? Sadly, our leaders are more biased toward activities that improve their popularity quickly than engage in long term sustainable solutions. They spend much more time in “politicking” than in working seriously for the people’s welfare.
Food insufficiency? We only have ourselves to blame. We never learned our lessons and we did not choose well.
So, next time you get your hands on a basketball and marvel at the sight of beautiful women in our beauty pageants, ask yourselves if these make your hunger go away?
If it does, go ahead and eat it and make my day! But always remember, “A hungry man is an angry man.”