Ineffectual

How much did government spend subsidizing small rice retailers for the losses incurred because of the price caps?

We have not been told. Some accountant should add up the figures from what the DSWD and the local governments doled out to help get the prices wrong.

Last Wednesday, President BBM ordered the price caps lifted immediately. There was no need to await the October harvests. The price caps have proven ineffectual.

Last Thursday, the National Statistics Agency reported the inflation rate for September to be 6.1 percent – substantially higher than the August rate of 5.3 percent. Inflation hit the upper limit of the BSP forecast.

A major component of the higher monthly inflation rate is surging food prices. Rice inflation, specifically, spiked 17.9 percent in September – the month rice caps were in effect.

Could the number have been higher without the price caps? Until detailed studies are done, we do not know. How much of the rice sold fall within the “regular milled” and “well milled” categories?

What we do know is that people found a way to evade the caps either by reclassifying the rice sold or ignoring the caps altogether. There are tens of thousands of small rice retailers. Government simply does not have the manpower to monitor all of them – much less, prepare charges against violators.

This is like threatening hundreds of thousands of riverside homes hefty fines and a jail term for throwing trash into the waterways. We just endure the floods spawned by clogged waterways.

Since government, eager to appease the rice farmers, ordered higher buying prices for unhusked rice, the retail price caps seemed all the more onerous. Left in place, the price caps would have created a serious supply problem.

Pulse Asia comes out with even more disturbing numbers. Because of rising food prices, 53 percent of Filipinos consumed less food in the month preceding.

We have all sorts of problems with malnutrition and stunting. Children will be the biggest victims of malnutrition and its implications on learning capacity. Enough talk about building our human capital.

Comparatively, there are even more damning numbers. We have the highest inflation and unemployment rates