THERE was a time when I thought self-sufficiency in rice was merely a political issue; politicians advocate for it to get pogi points with farmers. My idea was if we can’t be as efficient as the Vietnamese or Thais in producing rice we can always find other products we are more efficient at producing and make enough money out of them to buy all the rice we need?
Covid-19 has since shifted me from that position. We cannot depend on more efficient rice-producing neighbors when a pandemic is forcing them to prioritize their own food needs. Ergo, we have to be self-sufficient in rice, our food staple, as one DA (Department of Agriculture) undersecretary has recently also concluded.
But I must disagree with another DA official who appealed to Indigenous Peoples (IP) to convert their ancestral lands to farm lands. I am not aware of any industrialized IP economy. You simply can’t be more agricultural than IPs. What they need is technical and financial help to improve their agricultural land’s productivity.
Why not instead minimize or even force-stop the conversion of fertile rice lands into housing subdivisions and/or commercial-industrial parks. Farmers who are not so productive and not making enough from their farms are easily tempted by the money they can get from selling their land. Maybe if we provided these people with technical and financial help and significantly increased their income they might not be quick to sell their land.
Unfortunately, the country seems to subscribe to the principle that “FMRs (Farm to Market Roads) are the foundation of modern agriculture” as stated by DA’s FMR Network Plan. Yet, what really can we transport on these roads when our farmers are so minimally productive? That being the case, FMRs become clearly a support service secondary to direct technical and financial inputs to improve farm productivity.
This obsession with FMRs might explain our slow agricultural growth, .78% only in 2018. FMRs take up roughly 10% of the DA’s national budget. But, as I am told, FMRs get the biggest slice of the region’s budget. Yet curiously, it is DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways) not the DA that expends them.
Naturally, regional offices prioritize spending budgets for direct agricultural inputs leaving FMRs to the care of DPWH. Yet, when DPWH fails to fully expend DA’s FMR budgets, congressmen of districts where the roads were to be built castigate the holder, DA, and not the implementer, DPWH, of the budget.
I have my own but I will leave my readers to have and verify their own suspicions about this (congressional?) obsession with FMRs as a result of which these have become more trap than foundation for Philippine agriculture.