Philippines cracks down on illegal kidney trade

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: April 29, 2008

MANILA: The Philippines is banning kidney transplants for foreigners as part of a government crackdown on a growing, illicit trade in human organs bought from the poor, officials said Tuesday.

The ban is expected to take effect in May. Foreigners who violate it, as well as middlemen in the transaction, can be jailed for up to 20 years and fined as much as two million pesos, or more than $47,000, Health Secretary Francisco Duque said at a news conference Tuesday.

Foreigners who are related to Filipino citizens by blood are exempted from the ban, Duque said.

Although the sale of human organs has always been illegal in the Philippines, kidney transplants have become a lucrative underground business, with hospitals classifying the kidneys as donations to evade the law, according to Amihan Abueva, the regional director in Manila of Asia Acts Against Child Trafficking, a nongovernment group that lobbied for the ban.

According to Duque, kidney transplants to foreigners increased more than 60 percent between 2002 and 2006.

Abueva attributed that increase to hospitals exceeding the government-mandated cap on kidney transplants for foreigners. Under Health Department regulations, only 10 percent of a hospital’s kidney transplants may be performed for foreigners.

“These transplants are done openly in the best hospitals,” Abueva said.

A typical kidney transplant costs about $95,000, she said.

Organ transplants, including those for kidneys, are among the services hospitals offer under the government’s Philippine Medical Tourism Program, aimed at foreigners. Some of these hospitals, such as the National Kidney Institute, are government-owned.

As a result of the thriving trade in kidneys, many poor Filipinos have been willing to sell their kidneys for $2,000 to $10,000, a huge amount of money for an impoverished family.

According to Abueva’s group, kidney brokers scout for possible “donors” in the poorest slums in Manila and in the provinces. These brokers often are paid from $1,000 to $1,500 per transplant.

The Philippine media have produced numerous reports about donors dying because of complications.

There have also been reports of the brokers housing the donors for months in apartments in Manila and nearby areas until they can find foreign buyers, who are mostly from Europe, the Middle East and richer Asian countries like Japan and South Korea.

On April 21, the police raided such a house in a province just north of Manila and arrested three members of a gang that was selling kidneys to foreigners, the police said. They found nine donors in the house.

“I can barely provide for my wife and children,” one of them told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “I just wanted to earn some money and give it to them.” He said he was promised 120,000 pesos, or about $2,800, for his kidney.

The World Health Organization has identified China, Pakistan, Egypt, Colombia and the Philippines as the world’s leaders in the illegal sale of kidneys.

Officials have said that because some of these countries have tightened regulations on transplants, more foreigners seeking kidneys would come to the Philippines, unless preventive action was taken.

Duque, the health secretary, said the ban was meant to protect poor Filipinos. “The poor always end up as the ones being abused,” he said. “The sale of one’s body parts is condemnable and ethically improper. We have to stop it.”

High food prices leads to ‘rice passes’ for poorest Filipinos

The government reacts as the price of rice in the Philippines has nearly doubled since the beginning of the year.

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: April 27, 2008

MANILA: Poor Filipinos who are reeling from high food prices unseen since the 1970s will get some relief this week, when the Philippine government starts to distribute “rice passes” to the most impoverished families across the country, officials said Sunday.

The government has also set in motion an unprecedented relief program that would entail the distribution of cash subsidies amounting to about 1,400 pesos, or $33, a month to the poorest Filipino families.

These measures are just two of several implemented by the government as it tries to mitigate the effects of the global food crunch that has hit poor countries like the Philippines the hardest.

The cash subsidies, which will be distributed by the government-owned Land Bank of the Philippines through ATM cards, “should provide immediate emergency assistance to the extremely poor,” Esperanza Cabral, the social-welfare secretary, said Sunday.

The program will cost the government an estimated five billion pesos a year and should benefit about 300,000 families in the 20 poorest provinces. Each family will receive 500 pesos a month and an additional 300 pesos monthly support for each child, with a maximum of three children. A typical Filipino household has more than three children.

Cabral said the cash-subsidy program was already under way in five provinces outside of the capital and two cities in the greater Manila area.

Earlier this month, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said her government would make sure to “put food on the tables of our people.” The food crisis, she said, was “putting a strain on all hardworking Filipinos.”

“We need to prevent this strain on individuals and economies from becoming a crisis by taking decisive action,” she added.

On Tuesday, the Social Welfare Department will begin distributing “Family Access Cards” that will entitle families with a monthly income of less than 5,000 pesos to buy government-subsidized rice. The rice passes, Cabral said, would ensure that the poorest Filipinos be prioritized in the rationing of rice.

The National Food Authority, the government rice-trading agency, said last week that the rice passes would help the authorities monitor distribution. Last week, the agency reported incidents of unscrupulous traders buying government-subsidized rice and then selling it at higher prices. The cards, officials said, would have bar codes and would set off alarms if fraud was detected, including any attempts to buy more than the maximum amount allowed.

The rice cards will only be distributed when the National Food Authority withdraws its subsidized rice from public markets, a move opposed by many, although the government maintains selling directly to consumers is one way to keep the price low. A kilogram of the government-subsidized rice costs 18.25 pesos, or roughly half the price of rice being sold in grocery stores.

Since the beginning of the year, the price of rice in the Philippines has nearly doubled.

The Philippines is now the world’s largest rice importer by metric tons, according to March 2008 figures released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Asian food crisis has political and civil implications

By Thomas Fuller
Published: April 18, 2008
International Herald Tribune

Carlos Conde contributed reporting from Manila, Janesara Fugal from Bangkok and Peter Gelling from Jakarta.

BANGKOK: Asia’s food crisis is spreading beyond the specter of empty stomachs.

Politicians are facing the wrath of angry voters, government budgets are being stretched to pay for increased food subsidies and the potential for civil unrest looms, especially if the cost of essential items like cooking oil and rice continues to climb.

In Malaysia, where the governing coalition was nearly ousted in March elections, voters overwhelmingly cited the surging price of fuel and food as “the most important problem in the country” in a postelection survey carried out by the Merdeka Center, an independent polling agency.

If Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi steps down, which many members of his party are pressuring him to do amid postelection turmoil, he will be the region’s first high-profile political casualty of fuel and food price inflation.

In Indonesia, the government recently revised its 2008 budget, increasing the amount it will spend on food subsidies by 2.7 trillion rupiah, or about $290 million. Total government spending on fuel, electricity and food subsidies this year will total $20 billion.

“The biggest concern is food riots,” said H.S. Dillon, a former adviser to the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture. “I don’t see an immediate danger right now, but it has happened in the past and can happen again,” Dillon said. A rise in soybean prices in January led to months of small but widespread protests across Indonesia.

The price of rice, which on world markets surged 165 percent over the past year, is being closely watched as a barometer of potential unrest.

“Rice is a political commodity,” said Kwanchai Gomez, the executive director of the Thai Rice Foundation, a research center. “It’s not only an economic one.”

In the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is scrambling to ensure that there is enough subsidized rice available for the poor.

“The immediate concern is regime survival,” wrote Amando Doronila, one of the country’s most respected political commentators, in Tuesday’s edition of The Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The rise in prices affects consumers differently across Asia. For the wealthiest in Singapore, Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur, food inflation can engender a political backlash, but it is not a life-or-death problem. But for the poorest across Asia, rising prices mean the prospect of increasing rates of malnutrition.

“Food price increases are especially regressive,” said Paul Risley, the spokesman in Asia for the World Food Program, the UN agency that feeds the world’s destitute.

Singaporeans on average spend only 8 percent of their income on food, compared with 15 percent in Malaysia, 26 percent in Indonesia and Thailand, 28 percent in China, 33 percent in India and around 40 percent in Pakistan and Vietnam, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Those likely to be hurt the most by the sharp increase in food prices are the urban poor, the residents of Asia’s sprawling megacities, Risley said. People in rural areas may have less cash, but they can resort to hunting and gathering.

Slum dwellers in the Philippines, the world’s largest rice importer, are among the worst off in the region. Even before the spike in food prices this year, poverty and food insecurity were on the rise. According to a government report released in March, the number of people who do not have enough income to meet basic food needs in the Philippines rose to 12.2 million in 2006 from 10.8 million three years earlier, an increase of about 13 percent.

In recent weeks the government has mobilized police officers and soldiers to supply the poorest Filipinos with subsidized rice. The rice, much of which was imported from Vietnam, sells for 18.25 pesos a kilogram, or 20 cents a pound, half the price of the cheapest commercially sold rice in the Philippines.

Waiting in line outside a warehouse last weekend to buy government-supplied rice was Julieta Casanova, 60, who lives with her two children and eight grandchildren in Tandang Sora, a slum outside of Manila.

“We can’t survive without rice,” Casanova said. The government rations the rice to five kilograms per person, which Casanova said would last two days.

Arroyo, the Philippines’ president, and many other leaders across the region have blamed hoarding by traders and millers for the price increases. Thai Grade B rice, a widely traded variety, reached $854 per ton last week from $322 a year ago, a rise that appears speculative as much as driven by market fundamentals.

Bad weather and increased consumption have caused rice supplies to shrink, experts say, but the world is not in immediate danger of running out. Indonesia is in the midst of a record harvest this year and after years of importing rice will have a surplus of 1.2 million tons, according to Bayu Krisnamurti, deputy for agriculture for the Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs. The Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency, predicts that an overall good harvest this year will increase rice production by 12 million tons, or about 1.8 percent globally.

Yet this news has been overshadowed in a generalized atmosphere of soaring prices for gasoline and economic uncertainty stemming from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. In Hong Kong and other Asian cities, some shoppers have panicked, emptying shelves of rice as news of rice prices became a front-page story.

Even in Thailand, which produces 10 million more tons of rice than it consumes and is the world’s largest rice exporter, supermarkets have placed signs limiting the amount of rice that shoppers are allowed to purchase.

During a recent afternoon in the aisles of Tesco Lotus, a supermarket and department store in Bangkok, three worried customers surveyed large bags of rice and complained about the price increase. Jaruwan Krairit, 60, said the type of rice she usually buys had gone up 60 percent. Srisuttha Worawan, 57, said she had been to all the major supermarkets in Bangkok and “no one has the cheap rice,” she said, only the fragrant, more expensive varieties.

Yet these particular customers were not worried about going hungry: All three were looking for cheap rice for their dogs.

“I’ll have to give them dry dog food for now,” said Phanit Chatthanasenee, 60, who has 10 canines. “But my dogs don’t like that.”

In Thailand, as in many other up-and-coming Asian countries, food may cost more, but it remains abundant.

9 sentenced in Philippine coup attempt

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: April 8, 2008

MANILA: A Philippine court on Tuesday sentenced nine military officers to prison terms of up to 40 years for participating in a 2003 coup attempt against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

The officers were among 31 accused of raiding and occupying a hotel in Manila’s business district on July 27, 2003, protesting corruption in the military and demanding reforms.

The daylong mutiny ended with the officers surrendering to the authorities.

Judge Oscar Pimentel, who presided over the five-year trial, sentenced two officers - Captain Gerardo Gambala and Captain Milo Maestrecampo of the army’s Scout Rangers - to 40 years and the other seven to sentences ranging from 6 to 12 years.

Prosecutors said the sentences were harsher than they had expected.

“The decision caught us by surprise,” said Richard Fadullon, one of the prosecutors, adding that they had requested a maximum 20-year sentence for the leaders.

The military chief of staff, General Hermogenes Esperon, said: “Our judicial system is taking its due course. I appreciate them for having pleaded guilty.”

The fact that the accused changed their pleas last week to guilty raised speculation that the officers had reached a deal with the prosecution.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers denied a plea bargain had been arranged. However, Trixie Angeles, a lawyer representing several of the accused, said the officers could now expect a presidential pardon because they changed their plea.

“It would be normal for us to expect pardon,” Angeles told reporters Tuesday.

She said Esperon was “instrumental” in the officers’ decision to plead guilty.

Last December, 53 soldiers who were jailed for the same coup attempt were released after pleading guilty.

Several of the accused in the 2003 mutiny, including Gambala and Maestrecampo, had publicly apologized to Arroyo.

Prosecutors had argued that the mutiny was part of a larger plot to oust Arroyo and install a civilian-military junta.

Since she took power in a 2001 uprising against President Joseph Estrada, Arroyo has faced numerous allegations of corruption.

A navy lieutenant, Antonio Trillanes, who led the 2003 mutiny, alleged that corruption was so rampant in the armed forces that soldiers were dying because of inadequate supplies and facilities, a charge the military denied.

He also accused the military and the Arroyo administration of having had a hand in bombings in the southern Philippines that killed many civilians, a charge that the government also dismissed.

Trillanes and another mutiny leader, Captain Nicanor Faeldon of the Marines, are facing a criminal trial on the same charges and a separate court-martial.

Last November, Faeldon, Trillanes and other military personnel walked out of court and briefly occupied another Manila hotel, calling for Arroyo’s resignation.

Faeldon remains at large after having escaped from a police dragnet during that incident.

Trillanes ran for a Senate seat and won, even though he remains in detention awaiting a verdict.