April 12, 2008 (LPAC)--Reflecting the fact that the Philippines, the world's largest rice importer, is facing famine in the unfolding global food disaster, President Gloria Arroyo announced on April 5 a crash program, for $1 billion a year for three years, to make the Philippines rice self-sufficient by 2010.

While omitting the "Green Revolution" carried out by President Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s, which made the nation self-sufficient in rice for the first time in its modern history, Arroyo's program follows the same outline as that of Marcos - but without the necessary infrastructure to make it work, especially in a midst of the global financial collapse.

Arroyo said the government investments would go into fertilizers, irrigation, agricultural extension experts in the rural areas, education, research, low interest loans to farmers, post-harvest facilities, and access to high-yield seeds.

Philippine LaRouche Society leader Butch Valdes, asked about the program by a Manila radio host, responded that achieving self-sufficiency through scientific means is the right concept, but that the Philippines lacks the necessary energy, water and other infrastructure to make it succeed. Also, the nation's financial resources are being stolen by international financial cartels which have brought the world financial system to ruin. Without reviving the nation's nuclear-vectored energy policy, which was shut down after the coup against Marcos in 1986, and without asserting sovereign control over the nation's finances against the international usurers, the program can not succeed, Valdes said.

The Philippine LaRouche Society will campaign to get the government to adopt such a comprehensive policy, and to join with other nations which recognize the reality of the Anglo-Dutch destruction of the world economy and threat of global war, to demand a new Bretton Woods system, without which no recovery in any nation will be possible.