MANILA, Philippines — Presidential aspirant Sen. Manny Pacquiao has urged the government to use the P33.1-billion ayuda or cash assistance budget to buy palay directly from farmers.
Pacquiao said yesterday the funds should be used to finance the National Food Authority (NFA) in procuring palay from farmers at P17 per kilo to save the country’s agriculture, while ensuring that the poor will not starve due to the rising prices of fuel.
Even with the impending rollback of fuel prices, Pacquiao said the aid fund can be put to better use if it will be allocated to the NFA to help the country’s 10 million farmers.
The boxing icon turned politician lamented that a lot of farmers are financially crippled due to the massive flooding of cheap, imported rice and the unabated smuggling of agricultural products, including meat, poultry and vegetables.
“The situation of our farmers is too depressing. Many of them have even stopped tilling their lands because they cannot sell their harvest or even if they do, they would sell without making any profit,” Pacquiao said in a statement.
In Central Luzon alone, Pacquiao said many farmers are complaining that they cannot even break even on their cost of production for palay because the farm gate price only ranges from P12 to P14 per kilo.
Pacquiao said buying palay from the farmers at P17 per kilo would go a long way in providing farmers the much-needed help to mitigate the effects of the series of fuel price hikes and avert an increase in the number of Filipinos who are experiencing hunger.
He said spending the P33.1 billion to provide P200 per month or P6 per day to the bottom 50 percent of Filipino households will not make any impact in providing relief even to the poorest of the poor.
According to Pacquiao, P200 will be hardly felt by its beneficiaries because it is not even enough to buy one egg per day.
“That aid is a pittance since it is only equivalent to P6 per day. We should just use the aid money to procure palay which can be milled into rice that would be distributed to our poor families to help them fight hunger,” he said.