Sen. Gringo Honasan is calling on his colleagues to override the President’s veto of a bill lifting the height requirement for uniformed services. There is a realistic possibility for doing that in the Senate. The House, traditionally subservient to the Chief Executive, is quite another matter.
It is true that the presidential veto on a bill rigorously considered by both chambers of Congress, submitted to public hearings and then refined at the bicameral congressional committee is nearly petulant. What is surprising is that the presidential veto has so far been met with only tepid response by the legislators.
In our tripartite system of government, legislation is the exclusive domain of Congress. The executive branch exercises its veto power only rarely, respecting the prerogatives of an independent and co-equal branch.
At any rate, the veto is usually exercised only when a major issue arises that profoundly divides the public. An equivalent event in a parliamentary system of government will require the dissolution of parliament and a call for elections so that it is the people, and not a single person, who decides the resolution of an issue passionately dividing the nation.
Save for line item vetoes on the General Appropriations Act, which happens nearly every year, I struggle to recall the last instance when a President of the Republic shunts Congress by vetoing an entire piece of legislation. An event like this is causus belli for a war between the branches of government.
Over the last couple of weeks, President BS Aquino exercised the veto not once but twice: first, on a badly crafted Magna Carta for the Poor; second, on that bill relaxing the height requirement. No great national security concern animates that veto. It is hard to imagine public opinion is intensely divided on either piece of legislation. In fact, there has hardly been any public discussion on the two ill-fated pieces of legislation.
In the past, I suppose, the veto was not exercised because the executive branch assiduously monitored the legislative process. There is an office in both the Senate and the House — the Presidential Legislative Liaison Office (PLLO) — whose job it is to monitor bills in progress.
It should be fairly easy for the executive branch to signal its position on pieces of legislation while these are being considered in the various legislative committees. Backroom negotiations ought to influence the shaping of bills to the mutual satisfaction of the separate branches.
Having to court the embarrassment of a veto tells us the executive branch has been sleeping on the job. Proper staff work was not done. There has been poor coordination between the two branches of government.
Because people have been sleeping on the job, the veto, which should be a weapon of last resort, had to be applied — not once, but twice. Should there be a strong attempt to override the veto on any of the two measures, more loss of face will be due.
Hungry
Rep. Jack Enrile quotes really disturbing numbers. He tells us that 20% of Filipinos regularly go hungry. Another 40% lacks food on a daily basis.
In a word, over half of Filipinos do not get enough of the food they need to be fully nourished. Because of that, many more will mature underweight and undersized. Because the relaxation of the height requirement was vetoed, they cannot be employed in agencies that maintain a height requirement. The veto, therefore, is anti-poor.
The relationship between poverty and hunger is a chicken-and-egg problem. People go hungry because they are poor. They are poor because food prices have been pushed beyond their reach by structural inefficiencies that have not been addressed.
Discussion on food security was long ago intercepted by those who advocate protectionism in our agriculture. The concept was twisted so that it is understood as agricultural self-sufficiency instead of the price accessibility of nutrients. The protectionists want food self-sufficiency at any price. It is this delusion that aggravates the problem of hunger in our midst, a problem that appears much aggravated even as we boast of macroeconomic growth.
A distinction need to be drawn between agricultural self-sufficiency and popular access to food. Unless that it done, the worsening problem of hunger cannot be arrested. As in the insane idea of a forced march to achieve rice self-sufficiency that seems to have enthralled this administration, we will be devoting more and more of our scarcest resource, land, to cultivating a single crop at double the world average cost of production.
In Davao, two months ago, victims of a wayward storm went on a food riot, looting the warehouses of the DSWD. This could be foreboding of more grievous things to come.
The disturbing rise in the incidence of hunger preoccupies the Cagayan solon. As early as May 2011, Enrile authored HB 4626 which seeks to set up a comprehensive system for determining the minimum food requirements of Filipinos, reorganize the National Food Authority and establish the National Strategic Food Supply and Reserve Corporation.
This is a good start to focus our thinking about making affordable foodstuff available for our people. Eventually, this consideration should address structural constraints such as the country’s weak logistical system and inferior infrastructure that multiplies the cost of food as they are transported from the farms to the end-users.
Jack Enrile thinks we should have a Food Master Plan to ensure we have both abundant and affordable food stocks. Such a Plan might have to include things like agri-fishery education in the basic curriculum and reviewing the Philippine Fisheries Code of 1998 to update provisions protecting our marine resources. Ensuring access to basic necessities, after all, is a fundamental responsibility of the state.