Another major, major mistake: Budget cuts in agriculture

The National Federation of Employees Association of the Department of Agriculture (NAFEDA) strongly expresses its disgust over the budget cuts made in the agriculture department.

Governments elsewhere in the world put a very high price in ensuring food security for their people. In the Philippines, with nearly half of the population poor, food security means the assurance of a stable supply of quality and affordable food. Our government, therefore, ought to provide the biggest investment in agriculture. Unfortunately, it does the opposite thing by totally neglecting agriculture.

The extensive budget slash and the continued reduction of agriculture employees in government are the double-sided blade that cuts through the heart of our country’s agriculture sector. The brutal irony is that this dire development arose while the nation commemorates National Rice Awareness Month.

The 2001 agriculture budget was recently cut to about 25 percent from the original P51-billion down to P38.5-billion that adversely affected several vital attached agencies. For example, the National Food Authority that is responsible for food security, price stabilization and palay procurement suffered a budget cut of 70 percent. While Quedancor, the DA’s credit arm, treated ruthlessly: will not receive a single peso budget in 2011; and PhilRice, an agency that deployed hundreds of its Rice Sufficiency Officers (RSO) in every rice-producing area nationwide to help achieve 100 percent Rice Self-Sufficiency, suffered a budget cut of 75 percent.

Another imminent death blow to agriculture is the ongoing abolition of thousands of plantilla positions under E.O. 366 or the government rationalization plan. Thousands of rank-and-file employees of the DA and its attached bureaus were unfairly dismissed, displaced and substituted by increasing number of outsourced and provisional personnel since 2004 that unfavorably reduced the scope of agricultural programs for poor farmers nationwide.

The ill-advised budget cuts will have tremendous domino effect especially in rural areas where poverty incidence is at a high: farmers are dissuaded from engaging in food production, unemployment in the agriculture sector will worsen, rural economy will come to a halt, and poverty rate will increase. The 100 percent Rice Self-Sufficiency program will just be a mere empty rhetoric of Malacañang and the Philippines will remain perpetually rice import-dependent on Thailand, Vietnam or even Cambodia.

This is clearly another major, major mistake that will prove to be costly to what remains of President Aquino’s political capital. It will worsen poverty incidence and fuel the already simmering discontent among those who hoped for genuine change under P-Noy’s leadership.

President Aquino ought to revisit the Magna Carta for Small Farmers (RA 7606) signed into law by the late President Corazon Aquino in 1992 which assured “. . . to give the highest priority to the development of Agriculture . . .” with small farmers to be provided with the necessary support mechanism, including the assurance of budgetary allocation. P-Noy owes the nation the moral and legal obligation to support small farmers and to give utmost importance to rice agriculture in alleviating the economic and social conditions of the poor. The assurance of available and affordable rice to the poor is one reason enough to restore the P51-billion 2011 budget of the DA, the P8-billion budget of NFA for food security and rice stabilization, the P435-M budget of PhilRice for rice research and development and the original budgets of other attached agencies of the DA.

NAFEDA further calls on President Aquino to forego the Rationalization Plan under EO 366 and other anti-farmer policies such as Privatization, Liberalization and Deregulation imposed by multilateral financial institutions that exacerbate our country’s economy; to re-channel part of the foreign debt servicing budget to agriculture; to advance a genuine agricultural program with the end-goal of achieving 100 percent Rice Self-Sufficiency; and to implement a genuine land reform program and prioritize the strengthening of the agriculture sector as a sustainable base of the Filipino economy.