MANILA — Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol sees the need to build more roads that will link food production areas and markets in the country to help promote food security and boost agriculture’s performance.
Constructing such roads, he said, would facilitate and cheapen transport of agricultural produce from those areas to make food more available in the market at prices consumers and farmers can still earn, he said.
“The build, build, build program of government should be extended to arterial and farm-to-market roads (FMR) leading to the food production areas,” he said Monday in his official Facebook account.
Piñol raised the urgency for such action, noting only about 900 kilometers of FMRs can be built from the Department of Agriculture (DA)’s PHP9.5 billion budget for this undertaking.
“Current backlog in the FMR program is 13,000 km,” he said.
He stressed it would take about 12 years to address such backlog if FMR-building continues at the rate it is going.
Citing a report he received, Piñol said a sack of camote produced in Cebu province’s uplands sells in the market for about PHP2,000, while the farmer that grew the crop earned only PHP300.
“The price went up because that camote had to be carried on the back of a ‘kargador’ and hauled by jeep to the market,” he said, emphasizing FMRs’ importance.
Republic Act 8435 or the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act of 1997 defines FMRs as “roads linking the agriculture and fisheries production sites, coastal landing points, and post-harvest facilities to the market and arterial roads and highways.”
“Public Infrastructure investments shall give preference to the kind, type, and model of infrastructure facilities that are cost-effective and will be useful for the production, conservation, and distribution of most commodities and should benefit the most number of agriculture and fisheries producers and processors,” RA 8435 reads.
RA 8435 also mandates the DA to coordinate with local government units and their resident-farmers and fisherfolk “to identify priority locations of FMRs that take into account the number of farmer and fisherfolk and their families who shall benefit therefrom and the amount, kind, and importance of agricultural and fisheries products produced in the area.”
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) last week said agriculture grew 0.07 percent in 2018’s second quarter.
Reporting on the Philippine economy’s performance during the same period, the PSA also said agriculture, hunting, forestry, and fishing collectively grew only 0.2 percent during the same period.
Piñol said such findings show “agriculture, without added intervention from government and with the reduction of its budget, is leveling off”.
Agriculture will remain that way unless reforms are made to help boost this sector, he said.
Building more FMRs is among the reforms Piñol has identified as essential to boost agriculture nationwide.
Earlier, another reform he cited was irrigating 2.7 million hectares of rain-fed areas planted to rice to double production.
“That will be more than enough to feed this country, theoretically,” he said.
Piñol also earlier cited reforming the use of the government’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) funds for the poorest of the poor nationwide.
From merely giving 4Ps beneficiaries money on conditional basis, he said the program’s funds could be used instead as livelihood assistance for them — particularly in food production — so they can be economically productive and eventually break free from poverty.
“Recent developments show that while PHP75 billion was allocated for the 4Ps program this year and another PHP120 billion for 2019, this hardly cushioned the effect of inflation on the poorest of the poor,” he noted.
Qualified households receive 4Ps cash grants if their children stay in school and get regular health check-ups, have their growth monitored, and receive vaccines.
Such households’ pregnant women must get pre-natal care and professional health workers must attend to them when giving birth. Piñol likewise urged reforming the country’s economic priorities to include agriculture.
The reported economic slowdown from agriculture’s lackluster second quarter performance this year and inflationary effect of rice price highlight urgency for such reform, he said.
“Agriculture must be given its fair share of attention and budget,” he stressed.
He noted the Philippines is and will remain a country with agricultural production as its economic lifeblood.
“The positive economic numbers derived from jobs generated by the build, build, build program and other infrastructure programs are temporary,” he said. “When all the hammering and bulldozing is done, we’ll all go back to the very basic question: What will pass through these wide highways? What will be shipped out of these ports and airports? What will propel our economy? The answer is very clear: agriculture.”
Supporting and funding agriculture accordingly would enable this sector to produce more, he added. (Catherine Teves/PNA)
