Whistling in the dark

THE good news is inflation has cooled down to 4.7 percent, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. This is down from 5.4 percent in June, and suggests a downward trend since the rate peaked in the first quarter.

DBM’s Pangandaman is happy with the “downward trend” in consumer prices, but PSA is saying they continue to monitor price movements, especially that of rice.

NEDA’s Balisacan is also worried, even as our economic managers repeat their prediction that inflation will hit the 2-4 percent range by the end of the year.

They could be whistling in the dark.

By now, our readers must have learned of India’s ban on the export of non-basmati rice. Basmati is hardly eaten in the Philippines, aside from being quite expensive. But India exports 40 percent of the world’s very thin rice trade.

Because of higher production costs, FOB prices of long-grain rice from Thailand and Vietnam have gone up to $630 per metric ton, up from $450 in May this year, when the National Food Authority told the president that they were holding only less than 2 days inventory of the national daily consumption of 32,000 metric tons.

The president listened to his optimistic DA officials who said we had a good summer crop.

But that summer crop is usually less than the major wet season-planted crop, which got soaked by floods in the central and northern plains of Luzon, aside from the Mindoro provinces.

The main floods hit Cagayan, Pampanga, Bulacan and some parts of Pangasinan, aside from the two Mindoros. Nueva Ecija’s rice fields got soaked, but their floodwaters flowed downstream to Pampanga and Bulacan.

Still, my sources in Nueva Ecija, the traditional rice granary, are expecting lower yields for the main cropping season.

“Medyo nababad ang bagong tanim, kaya mababa po sigurado ang magiging ani,” they told me.

They worry though about stronger typhoons when the harvest season begins in September.

Added teeth to anti-hazing law

inflation report. Wait for the food price indicia come August, to be reported in the first week of September. Now let’s go into a bit of history.

In 1995, a mid-term election year, when Pres.

FVR fielded a coalition ticket of his Lakas and his co-opted LDP, the DA kept insisting we had enough rice, while NFA was reporting otherwise.

FVR’s economic managers believed DA, and resisted importing rice, even if NFA still had the rice importation monopoly, now erased by the rice tarrification law effected in 2019.

After the elections in May, came July and the NFA was proven right.

Because we failed to import on time, we had a shortage, with prices shooting up, and poor Metro Manilans had to queue for their rice.

DA’s Roberto Sebastian resigned, along with NFA’s Romeo David. FVR replaced them with the come-backing Salvador Escudero for DA and Joemari Gerochi for the NFA.

Prices began to normalize only after NFA imported the staple, which came in only in October, along with the wet season domestic crop.

Then there was 2008. Again, history is repeating itself these days.

India banned exports for the same reason as now, to ensure availability for the local demand.

The international rice market panicked, and the private traders kept buying from all sources, with Thailand and Vietnam and the other big exporters hiking their prices.

DA under Art Yap and NFA under Jessup Navarro were confronted by a shortage in NCR and other urban capitals, with angry consumers lining up for their daily rice consumption.

The current DA spokesperson was then the NFA spokesperson.

Only after Japan and Vietnam released part of their rice reserves to a pleading Philippines did the situation ease up. Credit Pres. GMA’s appeal to our friends, but at tremendous cost. We were buying at prices shooting up to a thousand US dollars per metric ton.

AT LONG last, it appears our lawmakers have hit upon two missing elements that would make the Anti-Hazing Law really a potent tool in preventing death and injury to neophytes or would-be members of Greek letter fraternities during obligatory initiation rites.

The Senate committees on justice and human rights, as well as public order and dangerous drugs, after a joint hearing on a recent hazing case, concluded: “While RA 8049 and RA 11053 did not shy away from imposing heavy punishment on those who inflict harm, even imposing liability on school officials, and barangay, municipal, or city officials, both laws, however, have inadvertently missed to include in the consideration of penalties the third, but most important, personality in every hazing-related death—the fraternity, sorority, or organization itself.”

Hence, their first recommendation is to require fraternities and sororities to register in a police database.

This way, members of a fraternity that figure in cases of fatal hazing incidents within a certain geographical area can be identified and perhaps summoned to give information on what they know about the case.

The failure or refusal of the organization to comply with this requirement “shall be prima facie presumption of the organization’s illegal activities,” the senators said.

Let

We do not know if this recommendation will pass muster among lawyers, not a few of whom graduated from law schools where frats recruit members.

They will probably scoff at this proposal as unlawful as this would make every member and even founders or alumni automatically “persons of interest” or even suspects in homicide or murder cases whenever a frat neophyte dies in an initiation rite.