Quo vadis, agriculture?

Quo vadis, agriculture? | Daily Tribune

Poor governance was palpable in his penultimate speech. Marcos entered office claiming agriculture as his priority and built his legitimacy on it. A president who once ran the Agriculture department could not be accused of ignoring farmers. That was the theory, but it was not put into practice.

His attention actually went somewhere else. He spent early 2023 managing dynasty politics within his own coalition and much of 2024 fighting his vice president. That fight consumed the back half of his term.

It produced an impeachment trial that did nothing for the farmer who labors to come up with a decent harvest for his family. Political survival became the real full-time job. Agriculture became a talking point, revived every July for the SoNA, then shelved again.

The numbers tell the story better than any speech. The Department of Agriculture’s budget nearly doubled under Marcos. Yield per hectare barely moved. Farmers received machinery and irrigation, then watched cheap imports crush the price of their harvest anyway.

Tariffs on rice fell to 15 percent. The government lost an estimated P47 billion in customs revenue because of it. That money was supposed to fund the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund. Instead, it vanished from the ledger, and farmers got nothing extra in return.

Compare this to the promise Marcos made at the start. He said rice self-sufficiency was within reach, that the sector would modernize under his direct watch, and that farmers would not be an afterthought this time.

Instead, the vice president’s impeachment trial dominated his administration’s attention while sugar farmers in Negros absorbed an 11-percent production drop with no comment from Malacañang.

A president who headed the Department of Agriculture should know better than most how fragile the sector is and that farmers plant based on price expectations, not government press releases.

He should have grasped the reality that infrastructure without market protection is wasted capital. The excuse offered by his allies is that governance is complicated since crises compete for attention.

Marcos chose agriculture as his founding promise. He chose to abandon it when his own political survival demanded his attention instead. The farmers who believed him are now up in arms.

The gap between farmgate and retail prices widened, with importers pocketing the difference. It happened as the president spent his political capital elsewhere — on partisan feuds and coalition management — while the sector he once ran in person was left untended.

Two years remain of his term. Reversing the lethargic progress of a sector on which most Filipinos depend will now require a choice he has shown little sign of being willing — or able — to make.