THE proposed P4.5-trillion 2021 national budget must have provisions for the rehabilitation of agriculture “power houses” feeding the nation which were devasted by the series of typhoons that hit the country, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto asserted Monday.
Recto said the rehabilitation of farms damaged by the typhoons should be “expressed explicitly” in the 2021 national budget, “or hunger looms.”
Recto pointed out that the affected provinces, including Isabela, Cagayan, Bulacan, Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan account for 38 percent of the country’s palay harvest, 37 percent of chicken production, and almost one-fifth of swine output.
The initiative of funding these areas’ rehabilitation “is like buying a vaccine against hunger, which is more lethal than the virus,” said Recto, recalling that the affected farmers “fed us during this pandemic. It is time to return the favor.”
At the same time, Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri suggested to Senate President Vicente Sotto III to convene an all-senators’ caucus to firm up the lawmakers’ position to “right-size agencies for priority response and merge agencies on disaster resilience, saying “there should be a go-to agency” to ensure prompt reaction.
In a statement, Recto pointed out that “in a country that sits atop the earthquake corridor and is the doormat to the typhoon alley, it is but inevitable that disasters become macroeconomic assumptions of the national budget.”
He noted that typhoons, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions “do not only rearrange the lay of the land, they can also reconfigure budgetary priorities.”
“So, when a trio of typhoons blew houses away, it also knocked down a few of the scaffoldings upon which this budget is made,” said Recto, adding: “And when they flooded the country’s food basket, a great part of the budget became water-damaged too.”
The Senate President Pro Tempore likened the wrath of the latest typhoon to hit the country as “a punch to the gut,” saying partly in Filipino: “Typhoon Ulysses hit the country’s food basket – the fertile plains of Cagayan Valley and Central Luzon. The typhoons overturned a huge cauldron of food.”
He noted that the affected regions are also major poultry and livestock producers, adding: “They combine into one contiguous agricultural powerhouse, a major contributor to the only sector which by posting growth over the past three quarters has proved itself to be pandemic-proof.”
“Urgently rehabilitating Ulysses-hit farmlands is a must if we want to eat tomorrow,” the senator stressed, adding: “Helping the farmers in these areas helps us more than it helps them. Covid kills by hunger. We should not allow typhoons to make a pandemic more brutal.”
At the same time, Recto reminded his peers that “a proposed budget cannot ignore disasters. It cannot be immune to changes required to fix the destruction disasters have wrought.”