Drought, Diokno and deregulation
Credit to Author: MARLEN V. RONQUILLO| Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2019 16:44:52 +0000
DROUGHT has been society’s scourge from biblical times. The land is parched. Standing crops wilt. The bright sun, for once, is not a blessing but a curse. Across the farming areas, desperate farmers preside over the detritus of the failed season: young yellow corn shrunk to a wasted pale brown, month-old rice plantings that even famished carabaos won’t touch, lifeless vegetable crops hanging limp on their improvised trellises.
Farm families, when they gather for meals, move in the robotic gestures of pain and hopelessness. No words are spoken. Attempts at normal conversation during times of drought usually end up with the father, the farmer and breadwinner, choking up on his grief. He can’t even say the next cropping season will be better.
I had been through these bouts of unspoken pain in my youth, as my farmer-father, at a loss for words to tell us there would be nothing for the next six months because of the drought, would often choke on his misery. Later in life, I would read Sonnet 29 , and realized that the Shakespearean loser was my farmer-father in times of drought.
Ok, there is always the town’s rich usurer. In times of drought, farmers cling to the town’s rich usurer as some heroic savior of lives.
Then and now, the official response to droughts is standard, as if carved in stone and impervious to change. It has always been a combination of PR and big words and bigger promises. The government will deliver help. Financial assistance will come. The drought-stricken farmers will be compensated one way or another. Two percent will get help, and the propagandists will make sure that help will get media coverage. Then the 98 percent of the sufferers will be forgotten. Farmers in this sad country have no one to turn to after calamities and disasters.
This is also carved in stone. Farmers and farming areas suffering from the current drought will have to fend for themselves.
Yet, to most farmers across the country, the drought will be a temporary thing. It is a horror show that will soon come to pass. Been there, overcame that. We overcame one in 2008, when there was a nightmarish confluence of a drought and a regional financial crisis. The bigger worry of real farmers — as opposed to the politicians who assume agriculture oversight posts to cover up for their real estate empires — is the ascendancy of a certified grifter, former Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno, into the powerful post of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) governor, the main steward of monetary policy.
Diokno, while Budget secretary, was the spokesman of the cabinet who scolds that regularly belittled agriculture sector. Members of the House of Representatives who pleaded for more funds for agriculture were lectured by Diokno on the hopeless state of agriculture and its diminished contribution to the GDP. It (agriculture) is a sunset sector, Diokno would lecture the representatives pleading for more agricultural support. It was later found that Diokno was the alleged architect of a P75 billion insertion into the national budget. And that billions of infrastructure funds had been allegedly diverted into the political bailiwick of his in-laws in Sorsogon province, a fund diversion as garapal as the Napoles scam.
It was the economic team of Diokno, Dominguez and Pernia that allowed the Land Bank of the Philippines to extend an unsecured loan of $85 million to bankrupt Hanjin and at the same time starve the small farmers and agrarian reform beneficiaries of the loans due them. The Land Bank was created to specifically serve the needs of two sectors — agrarian reform beneficiaries and small farmers. Yet, it violated its mandate with impunity, with the economic policymakers as abettors, and the unsecured loan to the bankrupt Hanjin was Exhibit A of the anti-farm bias of its lending.
The anti-farm bias of Diokno, this is the fear of farmers, will be the hallmark of his BSP stewardship.
One of Diokno’s major statements before leaving the budget post angered the sugar farmers and planters. He announced the government’s plan for unlimited sugar importation. Why was the Budget secretary the spokesman of key agricultural policies, which are 100 percent anti-farmers and anti-agriculture?
Diokno is expected to carry over his policy biases as main steward of the country’s monetary policies.
Deregulation of the rice trade is now a done deal, the gift of a pliant Congress to an administration which is as obsessed with GDP figures as the government of Mr. Aquino 3rd. Never mind that the end of the quantity restrictions on rice imports will kill the three million neglected small rice farmers. The process of dying has started. Farmgate prices for palay has dropped to P14 per kilo and this is just the first month of the deregulated regime.
Were the Filipino farmers just lazy and noncompetitive, they deserved what they got from Congress and the Duterte administration. But across Asia, the Filipino farmer is not only a literal beast of burden but he is also the farmer who has to labor under the most hostile of agricultural policies. Farmers in Vietnam and Thailand do not only get support, they get official pampering from their governments.
Here, they have to contend with droughts, Diokno and deregulation and many other pains inflicted on them by the anti-farm policies of the state.
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