Food or Press Freedom: A necessary trade-off?
Based on data released by the World Health Organization, 821.6 million people are hungry globally in 2018. That’s one in every nine people. Asia took the hardest blow at 513.9 million, with Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean trailing not too far behind.
Those ‘moderately’ or ‘severely food insecure,’ meaning those lacking regular access to nutritious food, had already reached a whopping two billion.
The 2019 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations pegged the number of severely food insecure Filipinos at 15.8 million (2016–2018), while the number of undernourished Filipinos are at 13.9 million (2016–2018).
Now, looking at the latest Social Weather Stations survey on severe hunger for May 2020: 4.2 million Filipino families (an average of 5 per family) or 21 million individuals have experienced severe hunger this year.
Top this with a $669-million loss to the economy, roughly $41 million in agriculture in the first 45 days of Covid-19, job losses to the tune of 252,000 ‘all across five sectors,’ and the Ombudsman estimating P1.4 trillion lost to corruption, we pretty much have a grim picture of what’s ahead.
So, with all these problems besetting the country — nay, the world — a hunger pandemic being the most frightful and devastating of all, why waste time fighting for press freedom?
I asked myself the question shortly after coming across the words of a prominent and well-respected Filipino author commenting on the recent verdict handed down to Rappler’s Maria Ressa. At the bottom of his short column for a national newspaper, the author wrote:
“The Philippines, alas, is a colony exploited and tyrannized by its own elites. No, the true essence of democracy in this unhappy country is in the stomach, when the jeepney driver can eat a meal that is also served in Malacanang. For that, I’ll sacrifice press freedom.”
I understand this to be the opinion of the author based on a long and fruitful past which I’ve neither witnessed nor experienced. He wasn’t only a revered novelist, but a young journalist and editor in the 1950s. As a staunch advocate of the democratic ideal, I likewise understand that everyone is entitled to express his own opinions regardless of how sure or unstable the ground on which such opinions rest.
Based on his stories, he was a person who knew what extreme hunger was like. He told me the tale of how, as a young man, he walked from Manila to his home province during the early days of World War II. To escape the possibility of starvation in the city, where the Japanese invaders had set up camp, he and his buddies, together with strangers, went on a journey to his home province located north of Manila by foot, stopping every so often to ask for food in homes scattered along the 210.6-km. trek largely made of dirt road.
I asked myself the question for the simple reason that as a journalist and a writer, I have always believed in the ‘Rights of Man’— life, liberty, speech and freedom of the press, above all. This is the air journalists breathe, the arena of our daily battles in the search for facts and, ultimately, the truth.
To cut to the chase, I find his statement somewhat confusing, if not altogether unfortunate for one simple reason: my country’s heroic and revolutionary heritage, a topic he loved to raise during our conversations, was largely built by writers, journalists and propagandists: men of letters and sagacity the likes of which left colonial Spain reeling in the aftermath of each written piece.
Dr. José Rizal, together with Mariano Ponce and Marcelo del Pilar, gave bone and intellectual muscle to the Propaganda Movement. This later led to the formation of the resistance newspaper, La Solidaridad.
Even our most ardent revolutionary, the Katipunan’s Andres Bonifacio, known for his brave exploits against the forces of colonial Spain, was a poet, translator, and a prose writer. One of his lesser-known prose works admonished Filipinos to be united in purpose and in sentiment if the battle against the Spanish imperials were to be won.
So, how did this celebrated author arrive at this juncture where he believes democracy is in the stomach, and if only for the promise of food security for the poor, if such a promise will ever find fruition, he is willing to sacrifice press freedom for it?
Food or press freedom? I join Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano in his question: Is the freedom to choose between these unfortunate ends the only freedom left to us?
Allow me to add my own little query: is the dichotomy between food and press freedom even appropriate?
The celebrated author and I share one thing in common: as younger men, we both knew what it was like to go hungry, to work triple the effort to put food on the table, to be so anxious about tomorrow that sleeplessness had become the rule more than the exception.
Not having any academic distinction to call my own, I leaped from one odd job to the other prior to being a writer — from stevedore of a popular meat company to janitor-assistant of the editors of a nationally-circulated newspaper. I knew what it was like to sleep only two to four hours a day, work during the remaining hours with the sun and rain beating down my back while hauling 1.9 tons of canned produce for a salary that could kill a rat.
By relating these experiences, I am trying as best I can to wrap my head around why this author’s path is very different from mine. Both knowing what hunger and poverty were like, both journalists, and yet quite mismatched in our idea of and belief in the relevance and significance of freedom of the press.
Am I too inexperienced or privileged as to miss the point entirely? Does my compassion for the hungry leave much to be desired?
I mean, how could press freedom, or democracy for that matter, be of any value or relevance if 9 million people die each year of hunger globally, with one child expiring from starvation every 10 seconds? What’s more disturbing is the fact that 621.4 million tons of food have been wasted this year alone. Let’s not even go to the issue of climate change which, many believe, poses as a threat multiplier. Famine, loss of crops, the claws of deserts crawling slowly to invade plantations: global and atmospheric heating is a reality too unimaginable for modern man to solve. Covid-19 only made matters more heartbreaking.
This reality stares us in the face every passing day.
So, in my attempt to wrap my head around this, I wrestle with the memory of those who were murdered in the line of journalistic duty. According to the UNESCO Observatory of Killed Journalists, 1,398 journalists have been killed globally since 1993. The number doesn’t even come close to hunger’s death toll.
But should the death toll define which is more disturbing and which is not? Isn’t one death one too many? Aren’t these deaths — both of the impoverished and journalists — the product of neoliberal politico-economic policies, to say nothing of tyrannical brutality, where force dominates the actions of key socioeconomic players, building on systematic inequality as a core value of market competition, and where monopolies are considered ‘reward for efficiency’?
Lest we forget, in this my sad republic, most journalists are part of the hunger statistics.
I understand the author’s statement to mean this: that freedom of the press, which intertwines with freedom of speech and expression, is but a means to an end, the end being the greater experience of such loftier rights as life, privacy, security and equal standing in the law. As mere method or instrument, freedom of the press should work hard toward the realization of these specific goals. Should these goals be met either in trickles or in droves, sooner or later, the need for the press can be shelved.
Or more accurately, one can trade or sacrifice freedom of the press in exchange for food on the table.
So, would it be right to say that if and when humanity’s state of affairs — governments, economies, market forces — suddenly shifted from its neoliberal choke hold to begin providing shelter, education, sociopolitical and economic stability, employment, potable water, and food above all — we can now dispense with the press and its attending freedom?
The logic bears mentioning: with all this come more freedom for the individual, family and community. Freedom to dream and achieve, to travel and see the world, to own possessions, and to accomplish feats which are otherwise impossible if burdened by debt, proliferation of crime and state-sanctioned abuse.
What use would freedom of the press have if all our other rights have been secured in what can now be called my happy country? It’s no different from asking what need do we have of history if, at last, humanity has learned from its past. Or that books ought to be burned shortly after having read them.
If there is anything about humanity that most of us are aware of, it is this: it doesn’t stop from communicating. It needs to know. Humanity thrives on information, sure and quick, as well as data which needs to be slowly gathered and circulated. A stuffed belly or the possession of a huge house, for all that it’s worth in pomp and circumstance, hardly ensure stability even in a society which has, by and large, matured, enough to dispense with the flow of information for good.
There’s no denying that terror haunts us with the persistence of a good predator. Suffice it that the much sought-after utopia may still be long in coming if history were to be our basis. At the height of the French Revolution where supposedly the Rights of Man were close to being enshrined, the Reign of Terror commenced. Roughly “300,000 were arrested, 17,000 officially executed, and perhaps 10,000 died in prison or without trial”. Joseph Stalin’s own efforts to establish a socially-conscious society and state-powered industrial development in Russia could not erase the millions who fell during his totalitarian reign.
Such is man’s nature when awash with power.
National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin (a.k.a. Quijano de Manila, the journalist), in his acceptance of the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1996, drew what is to be the blueprint that would define journalism and literature in the decades to come:
‘If people are still reading, they read, not for the magic of imagination, but for the profits of information [… ] The reporter is duty-bound to communicate-and to communicate as sensibly as possible. He must not play games with the reading public: Communication is serious business.’
Is the right to life — life being translated by so many as merely the presence of food and some level of financial security and privilege— loftier in essence than freedom of the press? So much so that when stability is achieved either personally, collectively or by the State, one can dispense with freedom of the press like some used garment?
Worse, would exchanging freedom of the press for food, security and relative peace for all be a welcome trade-off?
If so, then answer me this: why did our national hero, Dr. José Rizal, choose to write his novels and articles in La Solidaridad, exposing the brutality of colonial Spain, with the clear and undeniable awareness that these would one day put his own life at risk?
Andres Bonifacio, through Pio Valenzuela, offered Rizal the chance to escape from his prison in Dapitan, and what did Rizal do? Turn the offer down, saying it would be better for the Katipunan to launch the revolution by not looking back for one man. By doing so, Rizal knew he was a dead man.
Since then, how many writers, poets and journalists had been murdered while choosing to stand in the line of fire? Or better yet, choosing to exercise freedom of the press? Why choose to publish when you can have relative peace and silence through a full stomach?
Like the author, I long for the day when the poor in my sad country would be given that one chance to face their future without worrying about food on the table, or abuse from an employer, or survival wages which are no closer to survival, let alone wages. Believe me, I know. Like the author, I feel a solidarity with the Filipino poor having been impoverished myself. ‘There is no romance in poverty,’ as one writer said. It’s a condition so debilitating that sometimes death may be the only respite from the hunger pangs.
And yet I see many of my colleagues suffer one too many bullets in the head because they chose, more than life, more than food on the table, to speak truth to power. Poor journalists whose salaries barely come on time, if at all there are salaries to expect. They published their exposes, their analyses, their opinions regardless of the dangers. Maybe this is what it means to have freedom of the press stand side by side with the right to life and liberty in the Bill of Rights. Because more than any other right enshrined in the Constitution, freedom of the press is the one right which assures us that we will never be left to grope in the dark.
In short, what is food if you cannot see it? Prosperity means little to a person left to wrestle blindly with his own questions. Prosperity or a full belly is mere spectacle, if not altogether a bribe, if it blinds us to everything else. Isn’t this why we call out privilege when people flaunt it?
Likewise, is this what he thinks of the Filipino poor? Blinded by hunger to the extent that they would accept the scraps from the monster’s table in exchange for knowing what is happening around them? The slums as well as far-flung provinces raised a rancor after ABS-CBN was forced to shutdown in the middle of a raging pandemic.
I join French-Algerian novelist Albert Camus, who nonetheless worked as a journalist in the publication Combat, in saying, ‘One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But, perhaps, there is no other peace for the artist [and journalist, if I may add] than what he finds in the heat of combat” (Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays, Vintage International, p. 272).
Vigilance. Attention. Devotion to facts. Freedom to speak and publish. We should not dispense with these rights even if it means food and prosperity for all. Eduardo Galeano was adamant when he wrote, ‘Stability is unstable, jobs evaporate, money vanishes’. That’s one reality that should give us pause.
Besides, it belongs to the neurotic privilege of the rich and powerful to stuff each mouth with food if only to keep us from speaking against power. Silence via food coma is a reality we should all consider.
In a nutshell, food in exchange for press freedom or free speech is everyone’s last supper. And we know how that story ended.
I will not presume to lecture anyone, more so this revered author, on the merits or demerits of trading off freedom of the press for life, food and security for everyone. Why he said what he said is his own to decide and bear. To sacrifice one’s right for the betterment of society may seem heroic, well-nigh messianic, but no better than one who has accepted a bribe not just for himself but for all.
Blood had been spilled for the freedom that gives us the opportunity to know what is happening around us. As eyewitnesses to the brutality of cruel regimes, themselves the the target of persecution, intimidation, even murder, journalists carry within themselves memories of rapes, blood, intrigues, scandals, corruption, torture, abuse each assignment day. These same memories they bring home to their wives, husbands and children as they scrounge for food to eat or make sense of a salary which is no salary at all. Many fell to the lure of corruption as others take two to three jobs to make ends meet.
Journalism is neither perfect nor can it save the world. Whatever little it has contributed to improve society has been hard-fought and won by lives who share the poverty, misfortune and dehumanized conditions of many.
If he thinks it’s wise to trade freedom of the press for a slice of ham or a piece of pastry, then I hope he has the moral courage to finish his meals along the graves of those who were killed in order for him to say what he said.
