MANILA, Philippines – The chairman of the House agriculture committee proposed yesterday a cash-for-work program for farmers and farm workers instead of the planned P1,500 per farmer cash dole-out.
Palawan Rep. Abraham Mitra said the giving of the money, which is intended to help farmers buy fertilizer, “should be within the framework of a cash-for-work program.”
“I think it won’t be asking too much for them to work for a day dredging an irrigation canal, repairing a road, or improving infrastructure they themselves would benefit from. And I don’t think farmers will mind working for a day in exchange for P1,500, which is six times the rural minimum daily wage,” he said.
“With farmers having to work for it, then the subsidy is no longer a pure dole-out. If they’ll do the work together, it becomes paid communal action. They can tell urban taxpayers who will foot most of the bill that they have put in work for the subsidy,” he said.
Mitra pointed out that unlike the planned direct dole-outs, his proposal would “leave a paper trail in the form of a payroll, so the process becomes transparent, there will be no favoritism, ghost recipients are boxed out because the whole community will know who sweated for P1,500.”
He estimated that the dole-out program would cost the government P10.5 billion if all 14 million farmers and fishermen get P1,500 each.
He said the government should help not only landowning farmers but itinerant rural workers as well.
“The fertilizer subsidy will be given to rice farmers, but what about farm workers who are paid on a pakyaw basis? They are more numerous than landowning rice farmers, so the big challenge is what assistance we can give them, those who are in more dire straits than the farmers they work for,” he said.
He added that under his cash-for-work proposal, farm workers would be accommodated.
After President Arroyo personally distributed P500 each to poor families as subsidy for their electricity bill, Malacañang officials announced that P1,500 would soon be handed out to farmers as fertilizer subsidy.
Opposition congressmen warned the Palace of a repeat of the P728-million fertilizer scam in 2004, when Mrs. Arroyo ordered the distribution of P3 million to P10 million to her allies among congressmen and local officials shortly before the presidential election that year.
The funds were supposed to be used to buy fertilizer for farmers. In many instances, the recipient lawmakers and local officials purchased liquid fertilizer that was overpriced by as much as 1,000 percent.
Other recipients could not account for the fertilizer, telling government auditors who checked on their alleged purchases that the fertilizer had already evaporated.
In Baguio City, the President took the challenge posed by the country’s bishops to uplift the situation of the country’s poor, citing many government interventions, although much yet is to be done.
Mrs. Arroyo keynoted the Eucharistic celebration at the Baguio Cathedral on Wednesday afternoon to formally open the Luzon North Regional Rural Congress (LN-RRC).
Convened by Bishop Ramon Villena of the Diocese of Bayombong, the three-day LN-RRC has drawn some 21 bishops and about 300 delegates from rural poor sectors from North Luzon.