Of the many ideas being toyed around by the new President and his team at the Department of Agriculture (DA), giving land to graduates of an agriculture course resonates loudest to me. Of course, this alone does not promise to address the country’s food security issues, but this should help bring qualified young people back to the farm.
Marcos’ other sweeping statements of condoning debt to holders of agricultural land reform lots and free land distribution to other agrarian reform beneficiaries during his State of the Nation Address (SONA) are good sound bites, but more than anything else, a good thorough review of our agricultural system is needed as basis for any plan from short to long-term.
Marcos’ father, who we shall refer to as Marcos Sr. in this column, had been instrumental in a number of initiatives that could more or less be considered as having further led to the diminution of agriculture’s role in the Philippine economy.
The son must be able to sift through the many documented lessons of agricultural reforms introduced and implemented during the decades under his father’s authoritarian term, and to actually be able to draw up a new plan recognizing current realities.
Changed for the worse
A sea of change, not for the better, had occurred since Marcos Sr. declared the whole country a land reform area, and land reform as the “cornerstone of the New Society.” The promise of a “truly viable social and economic structure in agriculture conducive to greater productivity and higher farm incomes” for our farmers was never delivered.
We have fewer farmers today than half a century ago, and most of them are not earning enough from the land they had been given. Many of the laws today on agriculture are not delivering what had been promised. The country has become increasingly dependent on more food imports as land productivity for our small farmers has become less competitive compared to other countries’.
We talked of rice self-sufficiency in the ‘70s, and while we debated on whether this could really be possible during the next decades, countries like Thailand, Vietnam, and India not only succeeded by creating bumper harvests, but even went a step further by becoming export powerhouses.
The fate of our sugar and coconut industries cannot be sadder. Where once the Philippines was a leading exporter of agricultural produce, neglect over the years has seen the sugar and coconut sectors unable to survive the competitive pricing of sugar and coconut in the world market.
Marcos faces a dizzying challenge of undoing an irrelevant agricultural system that has deteriorated so much that changing it to be truly responsive to the nation’s needs will need more than the six years. So many existing laws need to be reviewed and made relevant, and new ones to be introduced. More importantly, overseeing their successful implementation would take more time.
Learning lessons
Marcos would do well to listen to how other countries less developed than ours have managed to transform their agriculture systems to make them more responsive to their people’s needs, as well as become significant contributors to their gross domestic product.
He should also keep his ears open to what is happening on the ground, particularly with more progressive local governments that have recognized the role that agriculture can play in uplifting the lives of their constituents.
The increasing empowerment of local governments plus the release of much larger sums of their internal revenue allotments have opened new opportunities to enrich the agricultural potential of rural areas. Stories abound of how well meaning chief executives of provincial local governments became instrumental in directing land productivity in the best way possible.
They have demonstrated better flexibility in delivering improved seeds, modern planting and harvesting implements, training, soil science, and even updated market data and weather information to farmers and farmer cooperatives in their respective territories.
They have also been able to devote more time and effort towards identifying and procuring big-ticket items like storage facilities for various agricultural produce that farmers badly need to protect their precious harvests. What these local government chief executives are able to do is something that a centralized DA will likely miss out or relegate to a lower priority in its list of must-dos.
Rationalizing land use
What Marcos needs to focus on is the macro-management of our land. Definitely, the much delayed National Land Use Law will help, but defining what agricultural produce is more suited to specific areas will go a long way towards determining land that needs to remain arable and, therefore, crucial to the country’s food security.
This applies to the need to regulate the existence of vital agricultural lands either by limiting their conversion into industrial estates or residential housing projects, or by adding new areas to respond to growing food demand of an increasing population.
We should look at land use as a way towards securing a better future for Filipinos: designating land for food, for housing, for natural resources like watersheds and forests, for export-oriented industries, and for commercial and manufacturing uses.
In ensuring the country’s food security, Marcos needs to strengthen the current supply chain system to enable food produce to reach consumers at the cheapest, safest, and fastest way. We have enough public and private markets where agricultural goods are sold, and coming up with a chain of resurrected Kadiwa Centers may no longer be necessary and a waste of his time and government resources.
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