Poor aren't worried about rice shortage
Posted on May 3, 2008 - Filed Under Review |
Local farmers are surprised at all this talk of rice shortage. They did the harvesting themselves and from experience, they know there’s enough rice to go around, in Pangasinan at least, for the next several months till the next harvest season.“What’s all the fuss?”, some farmers our team talked to had this expression written all over their faces, when asked for comment on the national ”crisis” scenario. They’ve asked around from their own farmer-relatives in other towns and said no one’s complaining, much less, seeing anything out of the ordinary in the rice harvest and supply.One farmer in Dagupan, (yup, not exactly an agricultural area, I know) was quick to dismiss the whole trouble as “artificial”, the handiwork of greedy rice traders who have capitalized on the “bad news” spread by media to begin hoarding the staple and thus raise prices, he says with certainty.
Anggan nabalang bilang so belas, akin agtayo sirin nabilay ed kamote, kasaba anggan ulnos na kamote o saluyot labat?, (Even if rice were to disappear, why, can’t we live on root crops and even vegetable leaves?), he spewed the challenge to no one in particular.
The way one really looks at it, it is not the poor of the provinces who are fretting over runaway prices of rice or the supposed shortage of the staple.
It is the middle-class (who may have never tilled the soil ever in their dreamy lives) and the urban poor (who insist on living in the Big Cities supposedly to find their own place in the sun there despite the odds) who are worried about the rice crisis and keep their ears glued to media reports on the situation like it were the End of Days they were awaiting.
Blessed are the countryside poor; in a tight crunch, it is they who will survive.
Comments
Leave a Reply