In with the old

The past year can be assessed based on how some key problems were addressed.

This year there was no repeat of the New Year’s Day 2023 paralysis at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. The long-term answer of the government? It looks like Marcos 2.0 is bent on dropping the NAIA hot potato into the lap of the private sector.

We enter 2024 with rice at P20 per kilo remaining a hallucination. Rice prices fueled high inflation in 2023. Surveys consistently showed that Marcos Junior was deemed to be weakest in taming high prices.

As rice prices began surging in mid-2023, the Marcos administration went into panic mode, imposing rice price caps in September that “shocked” his economic team, and then beating a hasty retreat after a month. As of yearend 2023, rice retail prices, like those for sugar, still had not gone down to the pre-Marcos 2.0 levels.

An anomalous importation in February of 440,000 metric tons of white refined sugar, awarded to just three favored entities including one linked to Imeldific 2.0, remains unresolved.

The sugar anomaly highlights the sad reality in this country: with the right connections, one can get away with anything. It’s doubtful that this disease in our society can be cured within 2024.

And the rice situation shows the continuing need to boost domestic agricultural production, which will minimize reliance on imports to stabilize supply and prices. Domestic pork producers, for example, want a stronger response to African swine fever instead of the one-year extension of low tariffs on pork and other agricultural commodities.

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In March, another weakness was highlighted, this time in the criminal justice system. Negros Oriental governor Roel Degamo was murdered along with nine other people on March 4, at his home in Pamplona town where his wife is the incumbent mayor.

At the start of 2024, the government has yet to arrest the suspected brains, the Degamos’ political rival Arnolfo Teves Jr. Now expelled from the House of Representatives, Teves is seeking asylum in Timor-Leste. Police arrested 10 suspects, who all recanted their statements tagging Teves as the mastermind.

Recantations of key witnesses in the drug cases