William Dar and our food insecurity

The other day, I dropped by the office of William Dar, the Secretary of Agriculture, to inquire about how he is facing his problem which is actually this country’s most serious—our food insecurity. The man is well-prepared academically and has had a lot of experience in farm management; and most important, he has vision. But I feel sorry for him for in a way, because he is almost programmed to fail. The tremendous problems that he faces are accretions of leadership failure and also the population explosion beyond his control.

We are now more than a hundred million, and I bring to mind our difficulties during the Occupation when we were yet a mere 24 million, and Manila had less than a million people. There was hunger and almost every vacant plot of land in the city was planted to camote and talinum.

Of course, there was the Japanese Army that had to live off the land. And now, our food insecurity is heightened by the Coronavirus pandemic which has induced panic buying. The rich have all the money to stock food, but not the very poor who depend on their daily wages to survive.

Let me enumerate the basic problems that William Dar must resolve.

1) Our arable land which is about twice that of Japan but we produce less rice than the Japanese. We are next to China, the world’s largest importer of rice. The solutions propounded in the 1950s no longer apply.

2) There is not enough land now to distribute and our forest cover has been reduced to about 20 percent. Land use must be maximized but so much land has been converted into housing and commercial developments and golf courses.

All over the country are huge tracts of land that are idle because their owners keep them that way for speculation purposes.

In Japan, idle lands are taxed highly so that their owners are forced to transform them into vegetable gardens.

There is so much to be done to increase agricultural production. Intercropping is one of them. In the Cordilleras and in other mountainous areas, it is possible to grow better coffee, oranges vegetables, and rocky soil could be made productive if planted to root crops. I recall Carlos Chan, the snack food manufacturer who has to import cassava from Thailand for his factories. He said that it can be grown together with other root crops in land that is not irrigated and is dependent on rainfall.

The major problem faces the fishing industry is the destruction of the reefs, and in some instances, the militarization of the Spratlys by China; this decreases the spawning of fish in the South China sea.

We will have to rely more and more on fish farms that will require more capital and labor to maintain. We need to rely less on meat for proteins and get it from plants.

3) Farm work is still tedious and the children of farmers leave the farm for more comfortable and financially profitable jobs.

4) Irrigation: in so many countries in the world farm production improves only with massive irrigation projects. And finally although this is beyond William Dar’s responsibility the undiminished poverty in the rural areas has been the primary recruiting appeal for the rebel movement.

William Dar has a doctoral degree in horticulture from the University of the Philippines, Los Banos, and has had a brilliant career in government both as an administrator and as a scientist.

After serving on the faculty of the Benguet State University in the northern Philippines, he became the first director of the Philippine Bureau of Agricultural Research (BAR) in 1988. This was a period when the Philippines started to invest much in building a national system of advanced agricultural research institutes, such as the Philippine Rice Research Institute, PhilRice.

William Dar was designated the executive director of the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic, and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCAARRD) and served on the governing boards of international research bodies such as the IRRI and CIMMYT and at ICRISAT. He also served for a brief while as Acting Secretary of Agriculture and as Presidential Adviser on Rural Develoment during the Presidency of Joseph Estrada. He was selected as Director General of ICRISAT in 1999, and he has continued ever since in that position. He has written the book “Feeding the Forgotten Poor” Dr. William Dar was conferred with MS Swaminathan Award for leadership in agriculture on 24 June 2013.

A visionary, he is hopeful that industrialization and modernization will improve the livelihood of our farmers.

The promotion of our agricultural exports should be improved. It is also necessary to consolidate small and medium size farms and build an infrastructure for development particularly in the erection of widespread irrigation systems.

He is very much concerned with the modernization of agriculture which includes a wide range of initiatives in dairy production for instance, in multi cropping, and the production of high value crops.

About 80 percent of the country’s farmlands are devoted only to three crops, rice, corn, and coconut. It is also important for Philippine agriculture to attract into farming the youth of the country. After all, with their imagination and technology, they will be able to make the land produce more.

The export of agricultural products should not be limited to bananas and mangoes. For instance, Philippine rum is considered by experts as superior to the rums from the Caribbean, but there is not enough of it in foreign supermarkets. Carlos Chan snack food factories are all over Asia now. Other food products should follow. To achieve these and other innovations, Dar appeals to the genius of Filipino entrepreneurs, for them to realize the great possibilities which the land offers. I think he is being heeded. There was widespread hunger during the Occupation; even today many Filipinos can afford only a single meal. The Coronavirus pandemic will surely damage our food supply; I pray this government is prepared for this.