UNLESS you have been sleeping under a huge rock lately, you could not have missed the series of bad news last week that have confirmed what I have been saying all along: our country's food security situation is very insecure.

Consider the following:

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In the Inquirer October 29, 2009 issue, the Secretary of Agriculture was quoted as saying that there is a "perfect storm" brewing and it will potentially severely affect global rice trade, possibly causing record import price levels.

Then in the Inquirer's editorial of October 28, 2009, there's the strong move of Thailand, a major source of our rice imports, for the reduction of our rice import duty from the present 40 percent to 5 percent.

The Philippine counter proposal is 35 percent, meant to protect our farmers from competing against cheaper Thai rice.

Thailand is strongly pressing their proposal under the aegis of the Asean Free Trade Agreement (Afta) and the proposed Asean Trade in Goods Agreement (Atiga) and it is appearing that their hand is stronger than ours in the said conflict.

If the import duty conflict worsens and Thailand decides to stop or suspend or minimize exportation of rice to us until the issue is resolved, which is not at all unlikely, we have a huge problem.

Finally, in the same Inquirer issue, a ranking UN official cited studies that projected a massive destruction of Philippine rice crops in a little over a decade due to climate change.

What are the implications of these dire predictions?

1. The fact that we are not self-sufficient in rice, that we are dependent on importation of rice for our supply, has put our food security largely at the mercy of exporter-countries and the whims of nature.

2. The biggest factor why we are not self-sufficient in rice today (we were in the 1970s) is that the National Government has largely put the country's irrigation program in the back burner for the last two decades. For a more extensive discussion of this, see my column article entitled, "Food Security: the Call of the Times" (Sunstar Davao, October 26, 2009).

3. If the huge quantities of rice we import annually were instead produced domestically, the resulting economic activities it would have created could have contributed significantly to the domestic economy.

4. If the huge amounts of foreign exchange used for importation were instead used for building more irrigation systems, the construction expenses could have perked up the economies of the farming localities and the resulting four-fold increase in annual rice production per hectare due to irrigation could have significantly increased the income of the farmers.

In view of the above, the National Government should seriously consider resuming the massive irrigation development program of the country that was started in the 1970s to 80s but has been relatively dormant from the 1990s to the present.

It should put a much higher priority to these projects in the allocation of capital budgets over fancy highways, and other less essential infrastructures.

Since more calamities are projected in the future, we have to build irrigation systems where there are fewer occurrences of calamities. Typhoons normally hit Luzon and Visayas and they destroy lots of agricultural crops in their paths.

Therefore, the most logical massive irrigation development area for the future is Mindanao-it is relatively free from typhoons and its rainfall pattern is evenly distributed throughout the year, auguring well for rice production.

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Ismael D. Tabije is the Secretary General of "Ang Patubig," a national organization of former NIA employees whose main advocacy is to ensure the food security of all Filipinos by reviving the dying irrigation development program of the country. Email feedback to idtabije@gmail.com.