Filipinos seem to be an overly tolerant lot — perhaps too tolerant that we have become submissive in certain instances, while in others, we have too readily surrendered to the fates as we wait for divine intervention to stand up for our rights and freedoms.

It is either that or the standards we require of our officials are so low to the point that we’ve populated the bureaucracy with the most inept, if not the most corrupt.

Note how in the development authority created to coordinate between the political divisions that comprise Metropolitan Manila we’ve constantly surrendered to the whims and whiles of publicly un-vetted factotums who continuously run roughshod over our rights, our laws and, most important, our collective decency. We tolerate their absurdity and simply grin and bear it.

We see the same among the various police organizations and their deputized sub-groupings. There is the same excessive public tolerance for rogues and scalawags. The same surrender to abuse by people considered persons of authority even when, through their criminality, they simply wield both the badge and the arms we authorize them to carry as tools of a nefarious trade. In this instance, perhaps it is fear that keeps us perpetually cowed.

In the area of public health, we started moving against the corrupt only when our young children were dying like flies and when we realized that multibillions had been re-channeled to fund a political campaign and nourish an avaricious craving.

At the transportation department, in the previous administration, did we not openly suffer and tolerate a toxic brew of incompetence and gross corruption to the point where they continued on, and one even had the gall to seek higher office?

Through all these, we needed someone like Rodrigo Duterte to come to our aid where he was intolerant of both incompetence and corruption. It is, however, unfortunate that between incompetence and corruption, it is the latter most often addressed with either dismissals, cases filed or mere reassignments.

We are still too tolerant of incompetence. A case in point is governance at the Department of Agriculture (DA) where the brightest klieg lights should be shining over the heads of officials given the recent developments inflicted on food availability by inflationary forces, some of which our agriculture officials should have had a firmer handle on.

The failures of our agriculture officials cannot be denied. Try debunking the contraction data.

For the total sector, the last quarter’s agricultural growth crashed to 0.20 percent from an already low 8 percent recorded in the same period in 2017. Gross values added by agriculture likewise fell to 0.20 percent from 6.3 percent in 2017.

Expansion in the rice sub-sector — a critical one-third component of the consumer price index, a high 18.5 percent contributor to incremental gross values, and a significant indicator of economic well-being — recorded an alarming negative 1.2 percent growth from a positive 11.7 percent in 2017.

Since the President’s clear directives given at the State of the Nation Address, no significant hoarder has been reported caught despite a declaration that these crooks have been identified. Are they deaf at the DA?

At the high prices of rice, where are the margins earned by traders going that the sector is increasingly decelerating rather than expanding?

Note other crashes. Forestry which recorded an expansion of 25.8 percent previously suddenly fell to 0.5 percent. The corn sub-sector recorded a negative 3.2 percent growth, falling from a 45.9 percent expansion in 2017.

The worst crash has been in sugar which we are now forced to import at a time when a weak peso makes such importations relatively expensive. Sugar unfortunately impacts on food, beverage and medicinal industries where the cost of contraction and undersupply directly inflates prices in these. The sub-sector crashed to a negative 26.2 percent growth from a positive 157.3 percent expansion in 2017.

Where food and agriculture are concerned, we cannot afford to tolerate such failures. Some people really need to leave.