Arrest

In four days, the administration of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. made two major and sensational arrests.

One, Alice Guo, aka Guo Hua Ping, accused of various crimes like lying before Congress under oath, human trafficking, tax evasion, money laundering, graft and corruption.

Two, Pastor Apollo Quiboloy, who has proclaimed generational divinity for himself and been accused of child abuse, sex trafficking, sexual abuse of minors, as well as federal grand jury charges in California of conspiracy, sex trafficking of children and sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. US federal agents have been looking for him since November 2021.

Says the US State Department: “Human trafficking is both a grave crime and a human rights abuse. It compromises national and economic security, undermines the rule of law and harms the well-being of individuals and communities everywhere. It is a crime of exploitation.” Life imprisonment and/or $1.5-million fine is maximum penalty for human trafficking.

On Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2024, Alice Guo, 34, was seized by Indonesian authorities in the Indonesian city of Tangerang, near Jakarta. On Sept. 5, at 4 a.m., Guo was turned over to the Philippine arresting party composed of Interior and Local Government Secretary Benhur Abalos and Philippine National Police chief Rommel Marbil who, using a private plane, flew the fugitive to Manila where she was read her rights, processed, handcuffed, fingerprinted and made to wear an orange detainee uniform. The long arm of the law finally caught up with Guo.

At 6 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 8, Quiboloy was arrested, after a 15-day siege by a 2,300-strong arresting PNP force at the sprawling Davao worship compound of the self-appointed son of God. Whether it was divine inspiration or deux ex machina, only the devil can truly relate the circumstances of Quiboloy’s capture by force of arms.

Now, I want President Marcos Jr. to execute another kind of arrest. This is arresting the unbated rise in prices of prime commodities, particularly food, and the atrocious interest rates slapped by the Bangko Sentral on hapless money users in the past four years.

There is no fine nor prison penalty for BSP people unilaterally raising interest rates to their heart’s desire. The 91-day T-bill rate has risen more than five-fold, from 1.1 pct in 2021 to 5.61 by 2024. They call rising interest rates a stability measure, although the effect has been one of political instability which cannot be measured by monetary aggregates. The more useful aggregate is solid stone which hungry small folks use when they start storming the palace looking for something to eat or someone to blame. There is also no penalty for unabated inflation.

But the rewards for arrest are huge and are something for the soul, especially if you are a politician, a pro-poor politician. Arrest is a French word meaning to stop or stay.

So arrest the rise in prices of food. Arrest the high interest rate regime of the BSP.

In the first half of 2024, the average farmgate prices of the following major crops showed hefty price increases: palay, up 35 percent to P24.74 per kilo; banana 15.3 percent, coconut 17 percent, pineapple 68 percent, coffee 46 percent, tobacco 8.6 percent, abaca 10 percent, tomato 37 percent, potato 2.3 percent, calamansi 8.8 percent and cacao 10 percent.

Production of palay, banana, mango, sugar, onion and mongo declined in the first half. In livestock, hogs 8.8 percent, cattle 9.1 percent, carabao 5.6 percent, goat 13.2 percent and dairy 7.5 percent, all showed large price increases despite higher production.

How important is food and agriculture? Farmers and fishermen are the poorest Filipinos. Their poverty incidence is 30 percent, double the national average. Yes, agriculture employs 10 million Filipinos. The food shortage is 25 percent of demand. The shortage is covered mainly by imports, worth P1.14 trillion a year. Production is hampered by huge harvest losses, 14.5 percent in rice, 16 percent in fisheries, 20 percent in fruits and vegetables, 26 percent in mongo and 32 percent in onion. Food needed to feed the hungry – numbering 15 million – is simply wasted.

Inflation is high because of low production or no production of food, which has been half of the inflation rate in the past two years. Yet, BSP keeps imposing high interest rates to solve the inflation problem when it should be focusing on production.

According to Economic Planning Secretary Arsi Balisacan, high interest rates cut our economic growth by half percent. And reduced food production. You need money to produce food and if that money is very expensive you don’t produce food instead. So instead of enjoying 6 percent GDP growth we should have had 6.5 percent, the best in Asia.

A half percent missed economic growth rate to me means P250 billion worth of lost production and 100,000 jobs that should have been created. Laments Sec Arsi:

“Our growth performance could have been even more impactful on all Filipinos if not for the high inflation and interest rates that the country experienced in the last two years. Considering the lagged effect of interest rate hikes that the BSP carried out in response to the high inflation in 2022 and early 2023, we estimate that economic growth could have been over half a percentage point higher in 2023 if such rate hikes did not materialize. More importantly, with slower increases in food prices, our efforts could have reduced the poverty incidence to around 13 to 14 percent in 2023 – instead of the actual reported figure of 15.5 percent – if inflation had been within target during the year. This would have translated to an even higher reduction in the number of poor people by 4.4 million instead of the actual reported 2.5 million between 2021 and 2023.”

*      *      *

Email: [email protected]