IF you pick one sector in government that has been waging a forever war against truth and reality, your best pick is the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the many sub-cabinet offices and instrumentalities under the department. At any given day, the great and egregious dissonance between the official statements released by the DA’s giant press release factory and what is happening on the ground reminds us of what George Orwell wrote in his dystopian book 1984.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. The DA’s version of Orwell-speak is summed up by this column’s headline: “Food importation is prodigious agricultural production.” The country imports most of its basic food requirements — rice, meat and fish — in massive volumes. And yet, the DA’s own version of 1984’s Ministry of Truth portrays the agriculture sector as a prodigious, dynamic sector that produces more than enough for the country’s food requirements. With the entire production process, in this Orwellian version, aligned with the cutting edge technologies, from drones to digitization. The agriculture secretary, Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr., provides the optics for that illusory dynamism by cosplaying as the sector’s action man in his flak jacket.
The DA’s propagandizing is Orwellian dystopia backed up by 21st century action man optics, usually the practice in autocracies where both truth and falsehoods are defined by the state. Tragically, enabled by a farming sector too prostrate and too engrossed in its struggles and utterly incapable of exposing the DA’s malign version of reality and gloating amid the sector’s overall depression.
How did we come to this sorry point?
I still remember that in the late 1970s, President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. sternly warned then-National Food Authority head Jesus Tanchanco against releasing data on rice importation. The warning was made after the then Times Journal broadsheet published in its inside pages (it was near the classified ads page) of barely 10 paragraphs that said the Philippines planned to import 25,000 metric tons of rice that year. Jess Tanchanco summoned the reporter and angrily asked for the “leaker” of the 25,000 MT of planned rice imports. I calmly told him that there was no “leaker” and that I had read the import document on his desk while he was briefing agricultural reporters on Kadiwa store expansions.
This year, a 25,000 MT of rice imports multiplied many times over — say a 2.5 million metric tons of rice imports for the year — will not even invite presidential ire. Importing 2.5 million metric tons of rice per year was the norm 10 years ago. This year, farm groups expect the government to even exceed 6 million metric tons in rice imports, a scandalously high volume and global record holder. The 6 million metric tons of projected imports hews to the projection of the US Department of Agriculture of 5.7 million metric tons of rice imports for 2026. China, the world’s industrial powerhouse with 1.4 billion people, will not even import 3 million metric tons of rice this year.
The more than 6 million metric tons of rice imports projected by farm groups is just about double the projected imports from the DA’s Ministry of Truth: a more than 3 million MT of rice imports.
Meat imports will be another grim figure that the DA’s Ministry of Truth will gloss over via propagandizing and cover-ups. For the first half of 2026, meat imports totaled 872,274 MT, or 33 percent higher than total imports in the first half of 2025, no thanks to the failure of the DA to rein in African swine fever (ASF), which started ravaging major hog-producing countries in 2019 and is still tragically wiping out backyard hog farms in many parts of our country. The 11 countries originally hard hit by ASF have recovered from the epidemic, with China’s recovery so robust that its current problem is pork oversupply and farmgate prices dropping down to a historic low of $1.60 per kilogram.
From 2019 up to today, the DA has failed to undertake massive vaccination to protect its remaining — and depleted — swine stock from ASF. But there is no national uproar over that because the DA’s Ministry of Truth has managed to paper over the abject failure by lulling the gullible general public via its relentless propagandizing.
Rice, meat and fish make up the trinity of our major food requirements and the story of domestic fish supply, just like the domestic supply of rice and meat, is another depressing story.
The country’s fish supply has been steadily diminishing, according to marine resources watchdog Oceana. From 2010 to date, the country has been losing 45 million kg of fish every year due to overfishing and other factors related to the degradation of the overall marine ecosystem. The government has been making up for that fish shortfall by issuing a document called a “certificate of necessity,” the go-signal to import fish. The failure of the fishery sector is theoretically within the problem-solving expertise of Tiu-Laurel, a billionaire fishing magnate.
But instead of solutions, the DA’s Ministry of Truth offers the usual propaganda and cover-ups.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
And in the Philippine agricultural and fishery context, this: Food importation is prodigious productivity.
