Legarda wants zero-based budget for AFMA

MANILA, Philippines - Sen. Loren Legarda, chairperson of the Senate agriculture committee and the Congressional Oversight Committee on Agricultural and Fisheries Modernization (COCAFM), fully supports President Aquino’s plan to use zero-based budgeting (ZBB) in government.

Legarda said ZBB will enable the President to take a fresh look at government goals and see if these have been met since the time they were set, reengineer or rationalize the bureaucracy if needed, and prioritize/revise needed programs, activities and projects. She said she hopes that if ZBB cannot be applied to the budget of all departments, then it should be piloted in the budget of the Department of Agriculture (DA) and other departments implementing the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA).

Zero-based budgeting is a budgeting approach that starts from zero in preparing the budget every fiscal year. ZBB users do not adopt the merely incremental budgeting as currently practiced. ZBB looks at the budget in relation to goals accomplished and prioritizes programs, projects and activities according to relevance, efficiency and effectiveness in the achievement of such goals.

The first try at zero-based budgeting in government is traced to then Governor Jimmy Carter’s use in Georgia in the early ‘70s. The approach was introduced for use by the Philippine government during the time of President Marcos by then Minister Jaime Laya in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

The concept of prioritizing programs, projects and activities remains a basic principle that serious and committed fiscal planners would want to use in the Philippine government today. However, it is a laborious process that was abandoned, not because it was not helpful but, because planners were disappointed that the amount of time expended in budget evaluation and preparation was often rendered wasted by whimsical or carelessly thought of political decisions.

Legarda said AFMA has its own appropriation mandate and requires overhauling of the total budget of the DA, which has never been done since the law was first implemented in 1999.