Photo Courtesy: DA
What is happening these recent days is no longer entertaining as the childish irrelevance of Antonio Trillanes, a fluke in the Philippine Senate.
Shortly before he left for Malaysia to attend the ASEAN Summit, Pres. BongBong Marcos announced that he issued an Executive Order 100 that establishes a floor price of palay to protect rice farmers from declining farmgate price. This sounds like another motherhood statement. At the start of his term he took over the helm of the Department of Agriculture with the promise and prospects of prosperity.
But nothing happened. I distinctly remember that China offered to sell several million tons of fertilizer at a marked down price on a government-to-government deal. DA Usec Domingo Panganiban even made a big news about it but this fizzled out along with Panganiban when Marcos and his defense advisers started saber-rattling on possible involvement in the China and Taiwan conflict in addition to the Scarborough claim.
But Marcos Jr. need not reinvent the wheel. His father Marcos Sr. and his DA secretary Arturo Tanco left a legacy, a template, that made the Philippines a rice exporter. Palace spokesperson Kler Castro recently revealed that PBBM has been talking to his late father, he could have just asked him what he did that farmers were so productive then and financially well off during his tenure.
The buying price of palay could never be legislated or decided by the issuance of an Executive Order. The Apo Marcos had the strategy that raised the price of freshly harvested rice always higher than the rice traders and yet the government need not come up with a price subsidy to do so.
Maybe Apo Marcos failed to advise Junior when they had a talk as Usec Castro disclosed. So this is briefly what actually happened to the best of my recollection. The late President Marcos did was to upgrade the National Grains Authority into the National Food Authority. NFA had buying stations in strategic places in Mindanao particularly in the undivided Cotabato province where he constructed a number of irrigation systems. The NFA stations are equipped with solar dryers, rice mills and silos. Each station had sufficient fund to purchase fresh palay harvests. The buying price of palay was always higher than the private traders.
While before traders dictate the price of freshly harvested palay, the farmers can no longer be intimidated because NFA is always there ready to buy their freshly harvested palay.
Newly harvested palay has high level of moisture content. Since most farmers lack drying facilities they are forced to sell their crops within two to three days otherwise it will turn rancid and will be unfit for human consumption.
With NFA, moisture content of unhusked rice can be reduced down to just 12% in solar dryer. In those days solar dryers are simply a vast cemented flooring where palay harvests are spread. Under the heat of the sun the moisture is removed. If the weather is cloudy or inclement palay is dried in silos. After drying NFA will proceed to mill the palay and then distribute the recovered rice ( roughly 60%) to authorize dealers. NFA makes a little profit which is augmented with the sale of byproducts which it sells to hog feed and fish food producers.
NFA has an adjunct agency called Food Terminal Inc. or FTI which has cold storage chain facilities again in strategic places. Its main storage facility is in Taguig because the biggest consumer market is in Metro Manila. FTI handles perishable products, like vegetables, meat and fish, from far flung provinces which are transported from the provinces by refrigerated vans all the way to FTI Taguig where these are sold to wholesalers and supermarkets.
These multi-billion infrastructures which brought bonanza to the farmers however were virtually mothballed when Marcos was ousted and Cory Aquino took over the helms of government. Either out of envy and ignorance of how NFA and FTI functioned, the two agencies were defunded, hundreds of silos and rice mills left to rot and rust. The real estate assets of FTI in Taguig were sold for a song to the oligarchs in Makati who helped feed those who supported the Edsa Revolt.
Five Presidents, including Marcos Jr., had since then taken over Malacanang but no one even bothered to revisit the plan and strategy that made Philippines a rice exporting country. What a shame and neglect. It was not only NFA and FTI that were mothballed, the irrigation systems were likewise neglected. The National Irrigation Authority until now have yet to conduct restoration and maintenance of the network of canals that feed water to rice farms resulting not only waste of irrigation water but destruction of dikes which had served as veritable farm-to-market roads.
What’s infuriating of it all is that the government spent trillions in ghost and substandard flood control projects which, as seen in Oriental Mindoro, even became the principal cause of inundation of rice fields and other farmers crop. Lately, Sec. Vince Dizon bared that they will have to dismantle a flood control projectin Davao de Oro as this only caused floods instead of preventing it.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has two years left. But one month is enough to get the idle NFA and FTI personnel submit to him the templates of these two agencies. I do not think whether Francisco Tiu Laurel would bother for he could have done so in day one instead of reducing the tariffs on imported rice and resort to unmitigated importation which slowly and surely tightened the noose on our farmers necks.
By the way where is Usec Domingo Panganiban? He was part of the Masagana 99 team.
