Third Eye on the Third World

Date :March 24, 2008

Author: John Mangun

BUSINESS MIRROR

“Outside The Box”

Title: “Agricultural Creativity”

Of course, you have heard it a thousand times; crisis provides opportunities.

Human thinking, particularly at the government policy-making level, tends to make problems larger by looking at too large a picture. Sort of like the old saying that you cannot see the forest because there are too many trees in the way.

Every day the newspapers are blaring headlines about high prices and potential shortages of oil, pork, pan de sal, rice, power.

And then my email inbox gets filled with various well-meaning politicians offering solutions that usually involve screwing around with the free market system (price controls) which leads to more shortages. Or tinkering with an already flawed taxation scheme that only might provide short-term relief.

The basic defect with government-based thinking is that creativity, ingenuity, and imagination is rare. For example.

Communication was a problem in the Philippines ten-fifteen years ago. Government in its wisdom created a program to put a telephone line in every barangay in the nation. Costly and inefficient was the only way to describe that program then as it looks now years later.

Private enterprise and private capital solved the problem of poor communications first with the pager and then with the cell phone. Now we have wireless ‘landlines’ rolling out.

In fact, it was only in the last few years that the government dropped that fixed landline program for the barangays look after creative thinking taking advantage of new technology as it evolved solved the problem. Had we waited for government to be at the cutting edge of the infrastructure problem, we would still be using two cans and a long string to communicate.

Now the Philippines has a deeper penetration of per capita wireless communications than most of our neighbors.

Once, just once, I would like to receive a proposal from a policy maker that shows any desire, willingness, and ability to break new ground to help mitigate some of the nation’s problems. You know how the government has these contests for the public to submit new ideas and win a prize? Or how companies offer awards and money to students with fresh entrepreneurial concepts. Maybe as the public, we should create to prize fund to give to a politician to win who comes up with a new, original idea how to deal with current problems.

Take the rice price and shortage problem. You would think that this is the first time the Philippines had to import massive amounts of rice. Yet what has really been done over the last 15 years to help solve this problem?

Virtually every government program to increase agri production and efficiency has been a band-aid on a bullet wound. What we need is a Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. No not for land redistribution that has been a failure but a CARP to increase production. What we need is investment in agricultural on the same level and with the same type of incentives that has grown the outsourcing business.

And remember this regardless of what you here the government says. Outsourcing was started by small local Philippine businesses who then attracted overseas companies to buy them out and form larger corporations who then advised the government on what to do to bring us to where we are today.

However, some problem must be solved from the top down and that is supposedly what government is there for to do.

I have read some of the government commissioned studies on improving agriculture and good intentions notwithstanding, they border on the useless.

Agricultural production like every other type of ‘production’ is a business. There has been some notable creativity in tackling productivity as for example the contract growing systems for poultry and swine. Frankly, it would probably be better to eliminate and consolidate the 80% of swine production that is characterized as ‘back yard’ with a few dozen pigs.

But that might be too dramatic a change for our social economy. So then government needs to do much more to raise swine production, keep stable prices that allow the consumer to purchase and the farmer and processor to make a profit. The same applies to other crops.

The knee jerk reaction and non-creative idea is to expand government subsidies for rice to keep the leftist “keep-them-poor but fed” proponents.

What if the Philippines just cannot produce enough cost-effective rice to feed the people? Japan has the lowest percentage of food sufficiency of all developed nations at 41% versus the US at 132%. Therefore, they produce other goods to make money to pay for their food. Even Japan barely produces enough rice that they need.

Get creative. There is only a limited amount of Filipino soil that can produce crops. If we cannot produce enough rice efficiently, then find something else we can produce to make the money to buy the rice. And try to think outside the box beyond the bio fuel crops like jatropha. Albert Einstein said. “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”

Email comments to mangun@email.com.