IT IS HARD to imagine that an agricultural country would ever import rice, or an archipelagic country would ever import fish. That is not all however, because we are also importing milk and flour. Looking at this from a positive standpoint, we should even be exporting rice, and exporting fish also.
In fairness, we are already exporting tuna but whatever pride we have gained by that has already been eroded by our importation of blue mackerel scad (galunggong), also known as round scad.
Of course, we could be proud to say that we are also exporting milkfish (bangus), but then again our pride in that is diminished by the fact that we have not really turned it into a global product, because for the most part, it is still mainly who are consuming our exported milkfish. In our case, importing fish is not really new, because we have been importing fish meal as feed ingredients for many years now.
What is even more difficult to imagine is having an agricultural country suffer from widespread hunger, or having an archipelagic country suffer from widespread thirst, possibly brought about my widespread drought or massive contamination?
What would be more ironic is if thirst would happen in a country that is always bombarded by heavy rains, and almost always resulting in deeper than deep floods.
Of course, as an archipelagic country we have always been surrounded by seas and oceans around us, bodies of seawater that could possibly be the source of fresh water, if only we could overcome our false notions that desalination is too expensive. Using only our common sense, we should be able to realize that it is more expensive to suffer from famine due to lack of irrigation, or thirst due to lack of water.
Backtracking a little bit, we could also say that we are also importing ice creams and cheeses, because we are importing the milk ingredients that are used to make these two products. Applying the same logic, we could also say that we are also importing pork and chicken, because we are importing the feed ingredients that are used to produce the animal feeds that in turn produce the livestock and poultry.
Well, I would admit that my own reasoning is partly flawed, because we are actually also importing ice creams, cheeses, pork and chicken as finished goods. Under normal conditions, we could say that there might be nothing wrong with that, but what is gravely wrong is that regardless of whether we are importing the raw materials or the finished goods, we are depriving our local farmers of earnings from our normal day to day consumption. (To be continued)/PN
