MANILA, Philippines—The line was not too long on that sweltering April Fools’ Day.

Leonardo Mendoza, wearing a T-shirt that has seen better days, was able to buy cheap rice at a government “rolling store” in less than 30 minutes.

“This will be good for three days,” says Mendoza, a self-appointed watch-your-car attendant at the Commonwealth Market parking area in Quezon City who earns P100 a day and supports a family of three.

Mendoza, 37, was among the crowd that queued at the two trucks of the National Food Authority (NFA) on the market’s dusty sidewalk when the NFA began selling cheap rice amid fears of dwindling supply and runaway increase in the world price of the staple.

Like everyone else, he got the allotted three kilos of Vietnamese rice sold at P18.25 a kilo. US rice also was available at P25 a kilo, but it wasn’t quite that popular. The bargain hunters said the cheapest rice available in the market previously was P28 a kilo.

‘Grace from God’

“This is grace from God,” says Aurora Abaincia, 64, cradling three plastic bags in her arms for her family of six whose sole means of survival comes from a 33-year-old son who earns P250 a day as a construction worker.

About a hundred people, mostly women and children, lined up single file before each of the two NFA trucks. The number held steady during the time that I was there.

From their scraggly looks, it was clear that the buyers were among the poorest of the poor, most of them anyway.

A few days after the announcement that President Macapagal-Arroyo’s administration was flooding the capital’s depressed areas with subsidized rice, the lines grew longer and soon soldiers armed with M-16 rifles were guarding the stores.

It didn’t seem like there was tension.

Happy faces in queues

There were even happy faces in the queues of obviously grateful people blessed with what was regarded as manna from heaven, until a local television news program showed a footage of an angry woman yelling for a rolling store to open up as the sun blazed and the sweating queue stretched longer and longer.

It was unclear where in Manila the flare-up of tempers happened. But soon the Philippines was mentioned in news agency reports as among several dozen countries where citizens were rioting to get their hands on the precious grain in a global regime of runaway food prices that worried participants in the spring meeting at the weekend in Washington of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF head warned the food unrest could turn into “war” and impoverish more than 100 million people in the developing world.

There has not been a food riot reported in the Philippines, yet, that grizzled reporters remember. But it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy the way the rice situation in the country is being portrayed by self-styled experts and Monday morning quarterbackers.

No supply shortage

Is there a “rice crisis” in the country?

“Yes, of course,” says Sen. Edgardo Angara, an agriculture secretary in the short-lived presidency of Joseph Estrada. He points out a global shortage prompted by climate change and natural disasters, depleted strategic reserves of such traditional exporters as Thailand, Vietnam and India, and an ever increasing population of rice eaters in Asia and Africa.

“We have a rice crisis here not so much in supplies because for this year, I don’t think we have a rice supply shortage,” he says.

“Supply is very tight locally as well as globally, but fortunately for us, we have secured almost 1.7 million tons of rice from Vietnam and the United States, to be delivered this year. In a couple of months, our dry season harvest will be coming in and that will add almost 5 million tons of rice,” Angara says.

Problem is purchasing power

“The difficulty is not the supply, but the purchasing power of people,” he says. “Almost 40 percent of our people subsist on less than $2 a day, the poorest less than a dollar a day. Those people cannot afford to buy rice and rice is one-half of the food budget,” he says. “That’s where the safety net must be put out.”

The rate was P41.93 to $1 on Wednesday.

The International Food Policy Research Institute says that as of 2007 13.5 percent or about 11 million Filipinos lived on less than $1 a day, 9.1 percent or 7.4 million on 75 cents to $1 and 4.4 percent or 3.6 million on 50 to 75 cents.

There is no figure for the ultra poor in this nation of close to 90 million, meaning those subsisting on less than 50 cents.

Poverty up close

I have seen poverty up close and personal as a reporter and humanitarian worker in disasters and conflict zones in the Balkans, Asia and Africa.

Before I joined the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net) almost three years ago, I went with a team of aid workers that brought emergency supplies to refugee encampments in Chad along its borders with Sudan and Libya.

Hundreds of thousands of black Africans had escaped to the area, fleeing Janjaweed militias on a campaign of genocide in the Darfur region in Western Sudan. It was blazing hot in this desert frontier during the day, and freezing cold during the night. There was little food or water, and no jobs.

Both Darfur refugees and the people hosting them were dirt poor. They shared international relief aid. They sat for hours in the midst of a sandstorm, where visibility was almost zero only several yards away.

Order in refugee camps

There was order in the long lines of women and men whose faces were covered with veils or turbans. Distribution of relief went on smoothly without the temper tantrums that I see in some queues here. Each of the aid recipients had been registered and given ration cards, something that should be issued to the poorest of the poor of the Philippines needing subsidized rice, if violence is to be averted.

Heaping smorgasbord

Nothing in Chad—or in some of the world’s major refugee emergencies that I saw in the 1990s at the end of the Cold War—compares with the situation of the Philippines, of Filipinos supposedly facing a “food unrest” as described by local politicians and prognosticators, or by those in the foreign media.

At Commonwealth Market where the subsidized commodity was being distributed, there were ample stocks of rice being sold at commercial rates, anywhere from P28 to P40 a kilo, along with the usual heaping smorgasbord of meats, fish, fruits and vegetables.

The last time I went to the area, prices of rice had gone up from P34 to P47 per kilo in the market to conform the new farmgate price the Arroyo administration had decreed.

The only problem was that they were not affordable for people like Mendoza and Abaincia.