I have been really busy with school recently so I have not been able to write much and yet, I have been keeping up the food crisis. In the Philippines, where state subsidization has kept the crisis at bay, there is little the government can do to keep up with the growing problem. Once a rise exporter, the Philippines now imports its agriculture, which invariably leaves the country and its poor to the whims of the international market. This Al-Jazeera clip and Associated Press article explain the most rudimentary steps that the government is taking to alleviate the strain on the poor. The real solution will be for the nation to start up its agricultural industry, something that will take time and resources and an abandonment of the neoliberal economic model that has encouraged countries like the Philippines to not grow rice and produce what it has a ‘comparative advantage’ in.

MANILA, Philippines: The Philippine government plans to introduce “rice access cards” for the poor to use to buy cheaper subsidized grain to help stave off a wider food crisis, officials said Monday.

The rice cards are supposed to benefit the bottom third of the poorest families in the capital, Manila. Outside the capital, the government said it will distribute separate bank cash cards to help families in the poorest 20 of the country’s 81 provinces with quick money transfers.

The measures came as President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s administration moved to cushion the impact of skyrocketing fuel and food prices. The Philippines has been paying record prices on international markets to make up for a 10 percent domestic shortfall in rice, the country’s staple.

Amid anxiety over adequate supplies of rice, the government said it has so far signed contracts for about half of the 2.1 million tons of rice it plans to import this year. The price of rice from Thailand, the world’s biggest exporter, topped US$1,000 (€640) per ton this month, up sharply from the start of the year.

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