Yap: It’s time to move on

For erstwhile agriculture secretary Arthur Yap, the tax evasion charges filed against him meant it was time to move on with his life.

Yap, the first Chinese-Filipino to have occupied one of the executive branch’s most politicized posts, handed in his resignation last June 29. He was agriculture secretary for only 11 months.

Though Yap was slighted at the tax evasion charges thrown at him and his family by the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Department of Finance, he agonized for two weeks, believing he could defend himself. In the end, he decided to leave quickly and shed the potential for bitterness the situation provided.

"I can’t be bitter. I learned so much, my world expanded. I understood that I was a fair target. I wanted to hold on initially, because... the constituents I worked for were not complaining that I was doing such a lousy job," he said.

But the more Yap thought about it, the more he realized he was in a "no-win situation."

"It became unethical for me to stay. And I wouldn’t be honest if I don’t admit that it hurt me deeply because the attack wasn’t coming from external forces but from within. Still, I gave them the benefit of the doubt that it was merely a lapse in judgment that I wasn’t even consulted" before the charges were filed, he said.

Yap added that had he stayed as agriculture secretary and proved his innocence, the charges would continue to hound him.

"No matter how good my work would have been for instance, I know that being in a politicized position, being an appointee of President (Arroyo), those charges would surface every now and then. Say in an interview, there would be one who would ask me how the case is progressing and then it would be the focus of the story, not what my department is trying to convey," he said.

Most of all, Yap wanted to spare his family, especially his parents, who became so upset by the charges that they stopped watching television news programs and reading newspapers.

It was a harsh lesson for Yap, who was one of the President’s favorite Cabinet members.

"One important lesson I learned from this is that politics is politics. I joined government thinking that the most important thing is to do your job right. But I guess I was too naïve not to have realized early on that one also had to watch the situation that was unfolding around you, that not everything is what it seems, and that you have to watch your back and take measures to protect" yourself, he said.

Yap prefers to look to the future, saying "there is no room for crying or whining here. I lived a 24-7 life on this job and there can be no regrets because I know I gave all that I could."

However, he said he will miss the thrill of "solving problems and finding solutions," which kept him going as agriculture secretary.

"I will miss the thrill of going into the unknown, trying to answer age -old questions. I thrived on those challenges, of looking for consequence. I will miss going to work each day believing that I was fighting for a cause bigger than myself because that made my going out there more meaningful," Yap said.

Despite his short stint at the Department of Agriculture, SACY (an acronym for Secretary Arthur C. Yap, pronounced "sassy" by DA staff) was nothing short of remarkable, according to observers.

Seed To Shelf

His successor and mentor, Domingo Panganiban, said Yap was actually the only DA chief who was able to achieve what many before him had intended to do but failed to implement.

"Yap was the first to have a real working model of a linkage between farmers, producers and the markets," said Panganiban, who was Yap’s chief advisor on rice production.

While previous administrations made a big deal of increasing the production of major agricultural commodities, Panganiban said Yap diverged from this path and focused on improving logistics to help farmers get direct access to markets and ensuring a steady food supply to consumers at affordable prices.

"The big problem of agriculture for me during my short watch was how to build prosperous rural communities. It doesn’t make sense bragging about bigger production. The ultimate determinant of what you have achieved is if your stakeholders are making money. What I saw is that this, farmers are still poor and when you ask them their most pressing concerns, they will tell you that they do not know where to sell their products, except to the middlemen who of course, would be buying at very low prices," Panganiban said.

Stakeholders were initially skeptical of the DA’s "Huwarang Palengke Linkages" program, a key component of its Goal 2 activities under Mrs. Arroyo’s Medium-Term Development Plan. The DA’s Goal 1 involved creating new two million hectares of high-value crops while Goal 2 focused on market linkages and improving logistics.

In just 10 months, Yap and his team actually had a working model running. They were well on their way to achieving their objectives of reducing retail cost by 22 percent by trimming post-harvest losses, cutting trading layers by 18 percent and eliminating informal cost by two percent.

Part of the DA’s initial outlay of P5 million went into mobilizing reefer trucks that transported commodities from major suppliers from Benguet, Northern Mindanao and Cebu. There are now at least 10 Huwarang Palengke markets in Metro Manila: Farmers’ Market and Muñoz Market in Quezon City; Concepcion Market, Marikina Public Market and People’s Market in Marikina City; Dagonoy Market in Manila, Mutya ng Pasig, Pamilihang Lungsod ng Muntinlupa and Polo Public Market in Valenzuela City.

The DA projects that by year-end, 30 to 40 more of these markets will be established. Data from the DA’s Agricultural Marketing Assistance Service (AMAS) show that as a result of these market linkages, prices of some commodities have been reduced significantly.

At the Marikina Public Market, assorted fish is P20 to P40 percent lower than prevailing prices while dressed chicken is P10 lower at about P86 per kilo.

Offshoots of this project is the "May Gulay Project" and the tentatively titled "Pork in a Box Project," both of which are fast gaining acceptance at Metro Manila’s public markets and selected supermarkets.

Under the May Gulay Project, the DA directly linked farmers, not to retailers, but to a processor approved by the DA. This gave farmers the option of selling their produce either through the project or to the usual traders. The vegetables are sorted out, cut and vacuum-packed in single-serve cooking portions. There are now three variants — pinakbet, chopsuey and sinigang — sold at a fixed price of P25 per pack. Each pack passed the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point that guarantees hygienic preparation.

Under the Pork in a Box Project, hogs, mostly from the Visayas and Mindanao, are slaughtered at the point of origin, processed, and packaged into one-kilo packs, which are stored in chillers and transported to various destinations in Metro Manila.

"What we are trying to do is not only to provide better market access to farmers, but also to give them a hand in adding value to their products, that way they can get better prices for their products," Yap said.

The DA complements these projects with other ongoing activities. One of them is the "Cold Chain Project," wherein Livecor provides "cold chain" facilities such as reefer trucks and refrigerated vans to select cooperatives in major meat-producing regions. Livecor, an attached agency of the DA, works with the Bureau of Post-Harvest Research and Extension on this project.

Earlier, the DA submitted a draft executive order to the President, calling for the expansion of the RORO Food Highway to beef up the participation of more producers seeking to bring their produce to Manila.

The RORO or roll-on, roll-off system involves the transport of trucks containing produce or meat products on board seagoing vessels. This system eliminates the need to load cargo onto trucks waiting at a seaport, reducing transport time.

To bring down the prices of vegetables from Benguet and nearby provinces, Yap last year struck a "Food Lane" deal with the Metro Manila Development Authority. It involved the exemption from the truck ban and color coding for deliveries of agricultural products at designated routes in Metro Manila. This cut post-harvest retail losses due to shorter travel time and also significantly reduced informal costs such as "kotong" or bribes demanded by errant policemen whenever trucks had to stop at checkpoints.

Yap also recently launched the Globe Agri-Text, which gives farmers access to market prices as well as weather reports to help them plan their crops.

"What we are saying is that all these talk about seed-to-shelf is not just a concept, we made it into a reality. Just a bit more meticulousness and perseverance and this could really be sustained," he said.

Yap noted that when the Agri-Text was launched "what I was envisioning was for farmers to realize how much money they can make, that maybe we could whet their appetites for them to go into high-value crops and improve their farming practices."

It was also under his watch that the first National Agribusiness Summit was held in coordination with the League of Provinces of the Philippines (LPP). During the summit, 59 governors pledged P700 million to the DA’s program of developing 371,327 hectares of new land for agribusiness this year.

"The DA committed P350 million to the local governments which meant that the governors were pledging twice what we committed or putting in P2 for every peso that we put in. Right there, we were giving them the opportunity to match their products with buyers who were also participating in the summit," Yap said.

To formalize the arrangement, the DA, the LPP and the private sector signed a covenant of support for the development of new land for agribusiness.

"Again, all these are part of our efforts to help farmers get to the point of actually getting out of poverty. The DA should be measured by how it has helped farmers become more prosperous. If they are prosperous, then we are building a stronger consumer-based economy. It’s a waste talking too much about food security because you’re not going to convince your farmers to produce more if they are losing simply because they can’t sell their harvest," Yap said.

Restoring Order

Tough as it was to sort out the myriad problems of the agriculture sector, Yap knew all too well what he had to do to get his plans implemented.

He first had to contend with a bureaucracy wracked by internal politics.

"When I got in I learned that senior officials weren’t attending meetings anymore and there was hardly any coordination among the agencies. Apparently, they were discouraged and it was such a polarized organization. So what I did was not to bring anybody with me. I gave them back their turf without a parallel organization working at the same time. Basically, I gave them respect," Yap said.

While getting people to work together, he also had to face the old guards at the DA, who were convinced that with no solid background in agriculture apart from his stint as National Food Authority administrator, the 39-year-old Yap would not measure up as agriculture chief.

"I just basically acknowledged their competence. I threw back the questions to them. I told them you’ve been here longer than I, so I know you are definitely better than me. In short, I took all of their experience and included talks with the private sector, but the most important thing is that I gave them back their voice, their confidence and self-respect," Yap said.

He noted that what the DA needed was not an agronomist, but "a manager who would run programs, targets and pressure them to work and point that sense of urgency that things had to get going. Because the answer was lying all around them, it was just a matter of picking up the best ones, putting it in programs and actually doing it."

Unfinished Business

At the time he resigned, Yap had wanted to jump-start several critical programs of the DA, the results of which would only be felt after several years.

These include overseeing the program to expand agribusiness lands, fulfilling the objectives of the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act which would have been a catalyst for farmers to become competitive in the global market. The AFMA was supposed to improve farmers’ competitiveness with government putting in necessary infrastructure to support farmers.

Yap said though the DA’s budget process is still commodity-based, he envisioned government assistance that would "stand the test of time" such as institution building, research, post-harvest facilities, techno-demo farms and regulatory frameworks.

"When the production aspect has been addressed and farmers are earning, they can now look out of the domestic market and explore export opportunities for instance. By that time, they should have a base to catapult from," he said.