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DAVAO CITY—After
nurses, doctors, teachers, skilled labor and engineers,
now the agriculture sector is complaining of a lack of
professionals.
Romulo
Falcon, assistant regional director of the Department of
Agriculture here, said, “We lack professionals in
agriculture.”
“Even in
UP [University of the Philippines] Los Baños where I
graduated, there a lot of graduates who have already
gone abroad,” he said, adding this trend is being
aggravated by the fewer entrants into the different
disciplines of agriculture.
“You’d
notice that there are only a few students nowadays.
That’s why we produce fewer graduates now,” he said.
“It’s a
sad refrain,” said Falcon, a graduate of agriculture.
Also
compounding the problem, he said, is that “even our
farmers now are getting older, and nobody replaces
them.”
Falcon’s
disclosure followed the long list of various sectors
complaining of lack of professionals due to overseas
migration, as various organizations and foreign
communities warned that an unmitigated and uncontrolled
migration of Filipino professionals would likely spark
crises and disasters in the long run.
The lack
of adequate hospital care in even well-kept private
hospitals and the exorbitant professional charges of
doctors have been blamed on the lack of medical
professionals in the country.
Similar
concerns were raised by the poor performance of students
in many aspects of literacy and national examinations
blamed on the flight of well-trained teachers to the
US.
And
during the last two years, even the Mindanao Association
of Mining Engineers has said that even its retired
engineers have been “recycled” and asked extended
services to staff many mining operations in the country
following an endorsement by the Palace to rejuvenate the
mining industry.
The
concern raised by Falcon came amid a national crisis on
rice since April this year, when prices went sky-high
and Filipinos scrambled for priority in the long queues
for government-subsidized price on imported rice.
Only
last week, when buffer stocks were supposed to cover the
lean months until the next harvest in September, the
price of rice again spiked to new highs following
reported speculation by millers and traders, but only in
Mindanao.
Agriculture and other government officials admitted they
were surprised with the trend, forcing statements of
concern from Palace officials and senior lawmakers.
Falcon
has ascribed the lack of professionals going into the
agriculture sector to the slow grind of improvement in
the sector, and said the rice crisis may be a “wake-up
call” for the country.
“We
would like to look at the problem [rice crisis] as a
wake-up call for all of us,” he said. “This is both a
problem and a phenomenon.”
He said
that in the case of the Department of Agriculture, “we
want to address this problem in a sustainable manner to
achieve rice sufficiency and food security.” |
