The solution – where the farmers were given land, despite the fact that they had no right to anything – came from Ramon Ang, president of San Miguel Corporation and the head of San Miguel Foods, Inc. (SMFI). Clearly, SMFI could have brought its case to the Supreme Court, where it could have been expected to take several decades before a decision would have been reached.

Instead, Ramon Ang decided to seek a solution to the problem that would please everyone and would not disrupt SMFI’s operations. He did this by buying land that he could then give to the farmers of Sumilao even when SMFI did not have to do this. This is a case where a company took on corporate social responsibility to its highest level. Clearly, by doing this, SMFI was taking on costs that it could have avoided or at least postponed to the time if and when the Courts ruled in favor of the farmers.

I just think that SMFI and Ramon Ang have not been given the credit that should have been given for finding and pushing the solution to what would have taken several generations before a solution would have presented itself.

Surely, there was always a possibility that the company would have been found to be in the right and the Sumilao farmers shut out from the land that they were claiming. Instead, Ramon Ang decided that SMFI would be a better corporate citizen of Sumilao town and Bukidnon province, if it gave in to the demands of the Sumilao farmers.

It is not unheard of that corporate citizens will insist on their rights against those of other citizens and come out as winners of the dispute several decades later. SMFI could have chosen this way of finding a solution to its problem.

The ones who have been getting the credit for the resolution of the problem have been the ones who helped to create the problem – the Church and the Government. Still, SMFI, instead of standing up for its rights and the rights of its stockholders and the company, decided to find a solution to the problem without insisting on its rights and without needlessly involving the judiciary.

Had Ramon Ang insisted on finding a judicial solution, it is possible that the children and grandchildren of the Sumilao claimants would not have had any lands to till within their lifetimes. Doing it this way would have been the easy way to go since being in possession of the area, SMFI could have enjoyed its possession as king as the case was pending in court. And neither the government nor the Church would have had a leg to stand on, if SMFI had chosen to take this route.

Thanks you, SMFI and its president, and the president of San Miguel Corporation, Ramon Ang,

***

Will people please stop sending Senator Nene Pimentel text messages? Apparently, the senator takes them seriously. Thus, when Ben Abalos was before the Blue Ribbon Committee, the senator asked him about a young daughter he was supposed to have fathered with another woman. The senator had the woman’s alleged address, bank account number, car license plate number and so on.

As it turned out, all of the information that he had in his text message was false. (I also received the same text message and decided to ignore it.)

Now, he has come up with another false claim (probably from a texter?) that Secretary Arthur Yap’s father-in-law was in the rice business. If this had been proven true, said the Senator, Secretary Yap would clearly have had a conflict of interest.

As things turned out, of course, it was not true. And the senator, of course, refuses to apologize for his error. Will the other senators apologize for their colleague’s bad behavior? Of course not. Senators don’t ever apologize for anything, which is also why the institution is losing whatever respect it had in the days when we still had quality senators.

***

Blaming the current rice crisis on the lack of land caused by the conversion of rice land to subdivisions, golf courses and so on is wrong. For one, we have never had enough rice – ever. The only times when we did not import rice were probably three years during the Marcos years when the Philippines actually exported rice. The rest of the time, we have always imported a part of our needs.

Is it more profitable for those in power to import rather than put together a program for rice self-sufficiency? Perhaps. Certainly making money on imports is easier than trying to get a piece of graft from what our farmers produce.

If we want to look at what is causing us rice shortage, perhaps, we ought to look more seriously at the effect of agrarian reform on rice production.

We used to have a rice granary in Central Luzon. That rice granary – for all practical purposes – is gone forever. Why? We have broken up the huge rice haciendas into smaller lots that can be given to land reform beneficiaries who really do not have what it takes to plant and harvest the same record yields from their smaller farms.

We have, foolishly, taken land away from those who used to give us the rice for our tables and given them to those who do not know anything about planting rice and harvesting the crop to feed this rice-hungry nation. And do we have a right to expect that we will have the same yields as before?