Anybody traveling through the Elliptical Road of Quezon Memorial Circle will not miss the giant tarpaulin blurb erected by the Department of Agriculture: “Ang Bagong Pananaw sa Agrikultura”. Espoused by DA Secretary William Dar, the “new thinking” in agricultural development has the following policy thrusts:
- Modernization must continue.
- Industrialization of agriculture is key.
- Promotion of exports is a necessity.
- Consolidation of small- and medium-sized farms.
- Infrastructure development would be critical.
- Higher budget and investment for Philippine agriculture.
- Legislative support is needed.
- Roadmap development is paramount.
According to Secretary Dar, the foregoing are the Department’s 8-point response to the age-old problems facing the agriculture sector, namely: low farm productivity, lack of labor, unaffordable and inaccessible credit, limited use of technology, limited farmland diversification, undeveloped agri-manufacturing and export, severe deforestation/land degradation, aging farmers and fisherfolk, and climate change.
Through the above “new thinking”, Secretary Dar expects a “levelling up” in agricultural development, meaning arresting the continuous downward decline of the agricultural sector. Per Dar’s reckoning, the sector accounts for one-fourth of the country’s labor force and yet contributes only nine percent of the GDP. Poverty is also a countryside phenomenon given the failure of the sector to create decent jobs and incomes for the rural masses. Dar blames the terrible collapse of agriculture to the failure of the average Filipino small farmer “to access low cost finance for inputs”, “limited links to the value chain and retail markets”, and “no access to better inputs and modern technologies”.
We sympathize with Secretary Dar on his advocacy of the foregoing “new-thinking” measures. However, we hasten to add that these policy proposals are not new and certainly not enough. Dar’s proposals had been fleshed out earlier in the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act of 1997, a law enacted by Congress to strengthen the sector’s capacity to adjust to the greater integration of the economy in the world market due to Philippine membership in the World Trade Organization in 1994-1995. The AFMA law was given huge annual billion-peso budgetary outlays in the late 1990s and in the first decade of the millennium. And yet, AFMA failed to deliver agricultural modernization and economic well-being to the rural population.
As documented by the Integrated Rural Development Foundation (see Rebuilding a Damaged Agricultural Sector, 2016), the desolation of the agricultural sector was due to the following:
- Aimless, mindless global integration. Unlike Fortress Europe or protectionist America (with its subsidy-focused US Farm law), the Philippines embraced agricultural liberalization/deregulation under a globalized economic order without any clear global integration strategy, without any clear adjustment and safety nets for the weak economic players such as the small farmers, and without giving ample technical/modernization and extension service assistance to the farming population. The Philippines simply embraced aimless liberalization (courtesy of the IMF-World Bank’s structural adjustment program of the 1980s-1990s), agricultural tariffication (commitment to the WTO) and endless programs to open up the agricultural market (via various bilateral and regional free trade agreements, e.g., ATIGA of Asean).
- Mangled implementation of agrarian reform. The Philippine AR program is one of the longest in the world’s history. It is supposed to be comprehensive and yet it is subverted by various legal and bureaucratic loopholes (e.g., stock options) developed by the rich and anti-reform forces. There is also no clear program to transform the AR beneficiaries into modern and progressive farmers; instead, in many places of the country, the AR beneficiaries have been transformed into poor lessors of land managed by the rich (such as the AVA system in the banana sector of Mindanao).
- Corruption in the DA and other agriculture-related agencies under the various administrations. So much has been written about this.
- Environmental degradation. The Secretary is correct in pointing out the gravity of this problem.
- Policy incongruence. There are many cases such as lack of DA-DAR and DA-DENR coordination on agricultural development. The most urgent at present is the absence of a comprehensive and just national and local land use policy. At present, the absence of such policy allows big city realtors and developers to convert thousands of agricultural land into cemented land, even “land banking” some of them for speculative purposes.
In summary, a levelling-up program for the agricultural sector requires an honest-to-goodness inquiry on the root causes of the collapse of the sector.
Secretary Dar has to confront also the pivotal issue: small farmer first or big trader/importer first? In the first year of the badly-crafted Rice Tariffication Law, which Secretary Dar opposed before his appointment because he favored a graduated approach, the Department’s role was reduced to fire-fighting. He inveigled LGUs in rice-growing provinces to support higher prices for the palay farmers. Eventually, President Duterte himself got into the act by providing extra funds to the NFA so that it can buy more.
And yet, there was no positive response from the DA on the proposal of farmer organizations to stop the flood of rice imports through the application of temporary tariff safeguards, which the WTO allows. Nor were there any positive response from DA on the demand of farmer organizations for a review/repeal of the rice tariffication law and an inquiry on who among the big rice importers/distributors are “gaming” the rice sector at the expense of the palay farmers and domestic millers and viajeros.
Finally, Secretary Dar has been citing Singapore as an example of a food-secure country even if this city state has no agricultural land. The implication of this statement is that food security cannot be equated to self-sufficiency or capacity of the Philippines to produce its own food requirements. Does this mean giving up the program of building up the food production capacity of the country and embracing instead the neo-liberal proposal to focus agri development on the production of more agricultural exports and non-food high-value crops?
On this policy issue, Secretary Dar needs to dialogue with the farmer organizations that have been painting anti-RTL slogans below his giant tarpaulins on “new thinking”. Farmer organizations such as the IRDF have been contesting the false premises of the neo-liberals that food security is secured when a country can import all the products its money can afford.
More on this in the next issue.