JUST like the Department of Agrarian Reform, the Department of Agriculture (DA) has identified a number of measures that will form part of the “big bold reform” (BBR) initiatives of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for the remaining years of his term. The presentation of the measures was made by no less than Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr., and I was able to obtain a copy of his PowerPoint presentation.
After the title page, Tiu Laurel immediately declared that the first component of the BBR was “better targeting intervention as the core policy framework.” Here, he manifested a correct analysis of what the overall goal of agricultural development should be, which is to uplift the socioeconomic welfare of our farmers and fisherfolk. The poorest of the poor Filipinos reside in the rural areas and hence agricultural programs and projects should ultimately result in bringing our tillers and fishers out of the poverty trap.
Tiu Laurel elaborated that component one of the BBR would require the DA to “target high-poverty areas with strong production but low productivity.” In the pursuit of this, the department will have to “use data-driven spatial targeting to align investments with measurable outcomes.” Slide 3 was highly insightful as it showed, through time-series (2010-2026) data, the budgetary resources allotted for various agricultural commodities. Two important observations can be gleaned from this slide.
First, compared to the budget for rice (its three program components are the Rice Budget (RB), National Rice Program (NRP) and the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF), the allocations for corn, high value crops, livestock and fisheries are a pittance. This validates our repeated observations that our rice-centric budget has led to the neglect of other agricultural commodities where we have a comparative advantage.
Second, which clearly should be a red flag for our agricultural managers, is that while the budgets for RB, NRP and RCEF have significantly increased through the years, palay production has been stagnant and even declining. This is a direct admission that the government’s rice policy is nothing short of a failure. The ironic thing though is that our politicians and policymakers kept doing the same thing for our rice sector.
The two slides should have served as the platform by which the subsequent slides in the presentation proceeded. Unfortunately, the next slides talk of the remaining six components of the BBR, which hardly touched on how the twin critical policy challenges — a rice-centric budget and rising rice budget devoid of productivity gains — facing the agricultural sector will be addressed.
The rest of the components are practically a litany of measures that are supposed to address the problems of the sector that remain unsolved ever since the signing of the Agricultural and Fisheries Modernization Act of 1997. In short, after correctly identifying the problems confronting agriculture, subsequent discussions collapsed under a cacophony of general or motherhood statements whose validity cannot be questioned but whose execution remains at the aspirational level.
The six additional components of the DA’s BBR for agriculture are: improved transparency, accountability, and participatory governance; enhanced co-investments and collaboration with LGUs; sustained interventions for geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas; strengthened extension services; increased investment in logistics and post-harvest infrastructure; and balanced and coherent execution of developmental regulatory mandates.
From the time that I got involved in the writing of the UPLB-PIDS Agenda for Action for the Philippine Agricultural Sector in 1986, which served as the economic blueprint to rehabilitate and reconstruct the sector under the Cory Aquino administration, helping draft the final report of the Agricultural Commission under the late Senator Edgardo Angara, till the term of Agriculture Secretary William Dar during the Duterte administration, I have repeatedly read and heard about the problem areas identified in the DA’s BBR and the measures needed to address them. I also know that most issues remain unresolved and that the implementation of measures to address the challenges facing the agricultural sector largely remain ineffective.
Not surprisingly, after a span of 40 years, we are still talking of the same problems and offering the same solutions. During that duration, in contrast, the DA’s budget has increased ten-fold, its personnel increased despite devolution of extension workers, the number of its senior officials grew three-fold and our rice importation, which was around 250-300,000 metric tons (already considered scandalous in 1985) now stands at almost four million metric tons annually.
The situation has definitely regressed. Even with more personnel in DA, the agency has not produced enough ideas and programs that will truly address our stagnant — worse, declining — farm productivity. It seems to be suffering from what a scholar once called “The Poverty of Philosophy.”
For a reform to be considered as a “big bold” one, it must be able to address the structural causes of the problem after an exhaustive and correct analysis of the situation. It should serve as a trigger for subsequent necessary reforms. It should be time-bound — its impacts regularly measured, particularly in the short and medium-run — and it should contribute to attaining the long-run vision of prosperity for our agricultural stakeholders and the sector in general.
The next installment of this column will delve into the proposed BBR measures for the agricultural sector, which if courageously implemented by the administration, will lead to genuine rural transformation.
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