Where math goes to die

THE most urgent government initiative at the moment is no longer the grandiose effort to amend the Philippine Constitution but something more mundane, a Mount Olympus-to-Earth descent. That initiative is to amend a few provisions of the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL), a measure passed in 2019 that eliminated all guardrails on rice imports in response to rising food inflation. That year, reckless and greed-driven importation by private actors made the Philippines the world's top rice importer.

Here is some background. The RTL is the reason the Philippines is the laughingstock of Southeast Asia, a country with a proud rice-producing tradition that wrote a law to kill that tradition and then breed a culture of dependence on others to supply us with that staple. In 2019, rice imports totaled 3.1 million metric tons — a historic high for the country — of which 2.7 million MT came from Vietnam. There has been no looking back ever since, with the Philippines competing with China for first or second place in rice importation. But here is the difference: the Philippines has no niche economic sector to be proud of and employs more people in agriculture than in any other sector. China is the "factory of the world" and has a $16 trillion-plus economy with 1.4 billion people.