HONOLULU, Hawaii—President Benigno Aquino bragged to a group of corporate chief executive officers’ attending the APEC CEO summit about his administration’s achievements in ensuring food security for the Philippines without having to employ radical change but simply by “just doing what was necessary.”
In his first public activity, which was addressing a session of the APEC CEO Summit on commodity security, Aquino was asked how far his government had gone in ensuring the sufficiency of the country’s food supply.
“I am very pleased to note that our agriculture minister is a giving us a guarantee that there’s no need for further importation of rice with the next harvest due in January,” he replied. “We will have an excess over that which is mandated as the strategic reserve in terms of rice. And what was done was not radical changes but rather just doing what was necessary.”
Aquino said that the government provided genuine certified seeds to farmers, providing the necessary inputs, helping upland farmers with marketing campaigns, and “not making it more profitable to import rather than to plant.”
“This are very basic steps that led to three quarters of bumper harvests …. We have done that in a year’s time,” he added.
The President took a swipe at his predecessor, saying his government inherited “tremendous problems” in the field of food security as the government of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was interested more in political survival than doing what was right.
The panelists at Aquino’s session were Frank Ning Gaoning, CEO of China National Cereals; Jing Ulrich, managing director and chairperson of Global Markets, China, JP Morgan; and Richard Adkerson, president and CEO of Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold, Inc.