Yap Proposes 2nd Green Revolution

To Address Global Food Woes

Secretary Arthur Yap of the Department of Agriculture (DA) has called for a second Green Revolution. He called for a renewed massive support by developed economies and industrial giants to international research and development (R&D) institutions that would help carry out this initiative in the face of the global food crisis.

Yap told a global forum in Germany that developed countries and big industrial corporations, which have contributed the most to global warming and other woes responsible for the global food crisis, should take the lead in bankrolling the R&D programs of major international agricultural research institutions such as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maìz y Trigo (CIMMYT) and Centro Internacional de la Papa (CIP).

“The Philippines calls for the initiation of a Second Green Revolution through research and development programs of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centers,” Yap said in his speech before the international workshop panel “Feeding the Asian Tiger: Challenges and Implications for the World Markets” at the 10th German World Bank Forum held in Frankfurt, Germany.

“We call on the major sources of the current economic, financial and biophysical adversities to refinance and renew massive support to the international agriculture R&D organizations,” Yap said. “A new level of technological change is needed to address the formidable economic and environmental challenges we are now facing.”

In the Philippines, Yap revealed, the administration has reevaluated its policy from mere food security to self-sufficiency, particularly on rice, in response to the recent world cereal market crisis.

Yap noted that the Philippine government was able to craft its rice self sufficiency plan with the help of international agricultural research organizations like the IRRI.

“The Philippines’ food sufficiency plan focuses on rice because of its role in the Filipino diet,” he pointed out. “Cereal and its preparations comprise 28.6 percent and 5.5 percent of the food expenditure of the lowest and highest income groups, respectively, which is ironic considering that rice price have increased by as high as 36.7 percent in August 2008 compared to the same period in 2007.”

Underscoring the urgent need to address the current food woes facing the globe, Yap pointed out that “as a common observation among developing countries, percentage expenditure on food among the income classes increases as income declines.”

“The Philippine case shows a 63.8 percent food expenditure among the lowest income group while a mere 31.7 percent, a 50 percent variance, is spent by the highest income group on food,” he stressed.

The Philippines would be self-sufficient in rice by 2013, as the government continues to take decisive steps to attain this goal by allocating massive funding for a wide range of agriculture-related projects, including irrigation, farm-to-market roads, dryers, cold storage plants, and the development of hybrid seeds.

Besides proposing a second Green Revolution, the Philippines also proposed the creation of a global rice stockpile during the High Level Conference on World Food Security hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) last June in Rome . Under Yap ’s proposal, contributions to these global food stockpiles could come from all member-nations as well as from interested donor-countries and multilateral financing institutions like the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and other regional development banks, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

Such food reserves, Yap said, could be managed by an appropriate United Nations (UN) agency with a track record in administering food reserves, like the World Food Program.

Rice should be first on the list of the proposed global reserve inventories because it is the staple consumed by almost three billion people, Yap argued.

The proposed global reserves could be expanded later, he added, to include other staples such as wheat and corn.

At the Frankfurt forum, Yap also noted that developing economies in Asia like the Philippines have to increase investments in agriculture as part of the social safety nets needed to stem the lingering effects of a worldwide food crisis that has now been exacerbated by the financial contagion sweeping the globe.

Despite the emerging global consensus for higher investments in this sector in the light of the global food crisis, Yap suggested developing economies will have to increase such spending themselves as they cannot rely on rich nations to provide the bulk of the funding, given that donor-countries are reeling from the worst global financial crisis in over a half-century.

He noted that despite the decline in grain prices worldwide in the past six months, the threat to Asia’s food security remains. Food staples like rice still cost more than they did in previous years.

For instance, rice prices in the world market last September are 147 percent higher than the 2006 levels and 134 percent higher than a year ago.

Yap said developing countries should not depend too much on first-world economies for food-related aid at this point as “the global financial crisis triggered by the economic downturn in the United States has imperiled the commitments made by donor countries and multilateral institutions to help developing countries stave off hunger and hike food production.”

The US, for one, has lowered the allocation for its PL480 food program for its recipient countries as budgetary constraints forced it to reduce aid funds to foreign economies, he said. /MP