Annus Horribilis
Credit to Author: Marlen V. Ronquillo| Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 16:10:56 +0000
FROM what fictional data the Department of Agriculture (DA) will base its upcoming pronouncement of a “growth rate”for the agriculture sector for the year 2019 is something beyond the ability of small farmers like me to comprehend. Small farmers know one thing though: William Dar, the current Agriculture secretary and a technocrat, is eminently capable of producing a made-up data set on “growth.” Government statisticians, bending to the will of those in power, will be willing abettors.
The country’s feckless agricultural economists — if such expertise in the economic field still exists — will offer no resistance, and no brave, empirically trained soul will counter the fictional data from the DA. The newspaper reports, where intellectual rigor and rectitude is the outlier rather than the norm, will just dutifully report the hot air from the DA.
A close friend, a former print journalist now active in social media, has a theory on how the DA would produce the figure on fictional growth. It would compute, he said, the rise in share prices of a publicly listed agri company now building metropolitan subways. And pass on that share price rise as strides of the agri sector. There are many of that kind in the country — agri-business companies with side businesses larger than their core, supposedly agri-centric undertakings. Drawing “growth” from thin air is not even rocket science.
As there a thousand and one ways to skin a cat, there are a thousand and one ways to produce fictional data to support an alleged “growth” for the agriculture sector.
But the reality of agricultural enclaves turned into virtual wastelands — and we are speaking of vast swaths of rural areas of hopelessness and misery spread across the country — will automatically belie any claim of “growth.” Reality is both jolting and educational. What the naked eye can see is more powerful than the most elaborately contrived data in the world.
This is the truth that does not even need an explanation. The year 2019 was an “annus horribilis” for the agriculture sector, a truly horrible year.
Looking back, the presidential rant (delivered in the midst of the last State of the Nation Address or SONA) on the epic fail of the Land Bank of the Philippines, in which President Duterte threatened to radically reform the bank for its failure to carry out its legal mandate, which is to serve as the banker for small farmers and agrarian reform beneficiaries, was just a minor assault on agriculture.
Of course, it was not. The LandBank was put up to serve the funding needs of small farmers and agrarian reform beneficiaries and Dr. Basilio Estanislao, the late former first president of the LandBank, tried to meet, against all odds, that mandate. In 2018, the lending of the LandBank totaled P798.8 billion, according to congressional leaders. It lent P21.6 billion to agriculture overall, which meant directing most of that amount to agri-businesses and allocating a token amount for small farmers and agrarian reform beneficiaries.
Worse, it faked its lending records to make it appear that it really carried out small-scale agricultural lending. And spent millions of pesos on newspaper advertorials to paper over that crime.
The worst law passed in the 21st century was Republic Act 11203, and it was an early 2019 assault on the peasantry. The law lifted the quantitative restrictions on rice imports and allowed “unli” importation of rice based on moderate tariffs. The law imposed a virtual death sentence on 3 million small rice farmers who have been neglected by governments from time immemorial and whose only protection against massive rice dumps and pricing debacles was the quantitative restrictions or QR.
For the less than 10 months ending December 2019 that the law was operational, an impossible volume of 3 million tons was dumped into the country (making the Philippines the world’s biggest rice importer for the year) and palay prices dropped from the usual prices of P17 to P20 per kilogram to as low as P8 per kg in the remote farming communities. Many farmers are contemplating suicide just to end their miserable existence.
As if the historically low palay prices were not enough, small farmers found out that the greedy rice importers undervalued their import prices, thus depressing the tariffs on the imports. The money pool from the rice tariffs, under the law, was to be used supposedly for an amelioration program for rice farmers. So, we have two situations: massive rice dumps and undervalued rice imports.
Then, the government planners, harebrained as usual, crafted programs that would just waste the funds to be generated from the tariffs. These are the programs that have been designed: training, mechanization, seeds, etc. etc. Loans and irrigation water are the most basic needs and these were absent in the so-called amelioration program.
Right now, the specter of a raging African swine fever (ASF) has all but wiped out the “Hog Belt” in Pampanga, a top hog producer, and many other former thriving hog -producing areas in Central Luzon. Hog prices dropped to P75 per kg and that was the average price until early December. Prices have somehow recovered to P90 per kg but that is still selling at a loss.
Around 90 percent of backyard farms in Luzon have been shuttered and even the commercial farms with world-class bio-security standards have been helpless against the ASF, which spread into the country via tainted pork from China, supposedly an ally of the country.
The Philippines’ hog industry was the eighth largest in the world last year and in 2019 it literally collapsed on the sheer viciousness of the ASF.
The government, clueless and heartless on agriculture as usual, wants to impose another cruel policy, the unlimited importation of sugar.
The agriculture sector is wallowing in Dickensian sorrow and the Scrooge is government.