IT was widely reported that the International Rice Research Institute’s (IRRI) Mestiso 120 (M-120) rice variety had yielded a record of nearly 12 metric tons (MT) per hectare in a small plot in Nueva Ecija. The average palay yield in the Philippines is around 4.1 MT so that harvest in Nueva Ecija is indeed impressive.
There are around 4.8 million hectares of land devoted to palay cultivation in the country. If we can attain a yield double the current national average, we can reduce the size of land devoted to palay and still be able to harvest more than 20 million MT per year. If we raise it further to 10 MT, we will be able to attain near rice self-sufficiency.
The potential contributions to development efforts are enormous. Freed land can be used for real estate and industrial developments. This will cheapen land costs and make real estate more affordable to poor Filipino households, assuming that proper regulation of the real estate industry is undertaken. Similarly, it will reduce the cost of land for factories and help bolster the industrialization thrust.
But this is daydreaming. The problem is that the impressive result obtained by IRRI is a pilot experience. To make real gains in the challenge of increasing overall farm productivity, particularly for rice, it is imperative that the Nueva Ecija farm experience is upscaled. That is where the problem lies.
Our scientists and researchers have produced numerous technologies and innovations in agriculture, but beyond their successful results in the experimental or pilot stage, little success has been achieved in widespread application.
There was the series of hybrid corn varieties produced by the UP Los Baños’ Institute of Plant Breeding, of which only a few found cultivation in a massive way. There was the “sinta” papaya variety — only a handful planted it for large-scale commercial operation. More recently, there is Bio-N fertilizer (which has a nitrogen-fixing bacteria that can substitute for inorganic urea), again produced by UPLB scientists, that has not gained widespread use among farmers.
I can continue with a litany of innovations successfully carried out in experimental farms and at pilot stages but never experienced scaled up application. However, the more important question to tackle is why is there a failure to adopt these innovations on a nationwide basis. I can think of six reasons.
Foremost is the disintegration of the research-extension link in the country as a result of the devolution of extension workers to local government units (LGUs). Besides the lack of interest on agricultural development undertakings, LGUs have the habit of appointing extension workers not on the basis of technical competence but on their loyalty to the appointing powers. The result is that the workers are ill-equipped to disseminate good agricultural practices and modern farm technologies.
Application of modern farm technologies can be accelerated among small farmers if they are organized into associations and cooperatives. Sadly, LGU extension workers are hardly engaged in community organizing or mobilization.
The second reason is dwindling research and development (R&D) investments. The recommended R&D funding level is one percent of agriculture’s gross value added. In the Philippines, this has fallen below 0.4 percent. Expectedly, our scientists and researchers are unable to regularly churn out new research and technologies that can address the needs of the agricultural sector, particularly at a time when climate change-related challenges are rising.
Third is the highly centralized manner by which agricultural budgets is allocated. The bulk is controlled by the Office of the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture (DA). As a result, most decisions emanate from the top and do not necessarily address the needs of local communities. The commodity orientation of the DA’s programs (i.e., rice, corn, livestock, etc.) aggravates the problem as units operate in silos instead of responding to the needs of farmers.
At the local level, the tiller is not only engaged in palay production but also in the cultivation of other crops like vegetables or raising chicken or ducks to augment the family income. This means that the commodity orientation of programs cannot respond to the farmer’s array of needs.
Fourth, politicians are not interested so much on raising farm productivity as to the distribution of subsidies. These “ayudas” promote the patronage politics that politicians assiduously cultivate among voters to perpetuate themselves in power, besides being opportunities for rent-seeking activities.
Notice that the “ayudas” are mostly production support or inputs such as free seeds, fertilizer, irrigation water, fuel, etc., which only last during one cropping season. One has to ensure their continued distribution, which is fiscally draining for the government, to achieve a certain productivity level.
Subsidies in the form of public goods such as irrigation, R&D, farm-to-market roads and warehouses last longer and benefit the entire community rather than just an individual tiller. Unfortunately, government programs give lesser priority to providing public goods as they yield lesser political “pogi” points for the incumbents.
Fifth is that DA does not have a robust monitoring and evaluation system capable of tracking progress made and distilling lessons from implementation. Notice that the manner by which DA measures success is in terms of the extent of its distribution of input subsidies rather than whether these raised productivity and — more importantly — farmer incomes. There is no premium placed on monitoring for results; it is rather on how fast budgets are spent and “ayudas” distributed.
Finally, officials are not held accountable based on performance. There is practically no reward for the good performers and more importantly, no penalty for nonperformers or slackers. There is no motivation to increase overall farm productivity because one’s appointment is dependent on loyalty to the appointing authority.
No wonder that the Philippine agriculture sector has no chance in the immediate future of unshackling itself from the path of underdevelopment and backwardness.
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