Children’s nourishment is a weapon for victory in elections.
Mr. Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr., you are very lucky. The President, after serving as concurrent Secretary of Agriculture for one year and five months, relinquished the post and handed it to you to finish the work that had not been done.
Mr. Laurel, yours is the golden opportunity to help the President fulfill his most popular promise to the Filipino people: help him fulfill that promise — rice at P20 per kilo!
Do it, and become a star overnight, and a senator in 2028!
This column with all its readers will endorse your candidacy for senator and we guarantee your victory.
It could be observed that the President did his best to fulfill his most popular promise but to no avail. The President explained that the target for rice was hinged on fixing the country’s value chain which are the service stages involved in producing a product that is sold to consumers.
But for the President himself to do all this would consume all his time. He had to relinquish the post to the fishing tycoon who would do the tasks for him.
The budget of the Department of Agriculture should be augmented by an additional P600 billion to finance the efforts to reduce the price of rice to P20 per kilo and to finance the revival of the Ferdinand Marcos Sr. Nutri-Bun and Choco-Lait in Tetra Pack program for undernourished children in the farmlands.
Two years and almost 10 months after President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. took the reins of government following his overwhelming victory in the 2022 elections, some of his promises and plans for the country have started to take shape. But the most popular among his campaign promises have remained unfulfilled.
The promise of rice at P20/kilo was among the most popular campaign promises of Marcos. As a contender for the highest post of the land, he vowed to recommend a price cap for rice and task government agencies to serve as middlemen in the procurement of harvests. But two years into his administration, P20/kilo rice was still not available in the markets. Data of the Department of Agriculture showed that regularly milled rice at the markets in Metro Manila was at P38 to P50 per kilo.
However, one could purchase P25 per kilo rice at the government–sponsored Kadiwa stalls, which are part of the Marcos administration’s effort to ensure food security and shield consumers from the rise in prices of basic commodities.
To popularize his effort to reduce the price of rice to P20 per kilo and attract greater participation among the farmers and fisherfolk, the secretary of Agriculture can utilize the huge additional funding to revive the Ferdinand Marcos Sr. Nutri-Bun and Choco-Lait in Tetra Pack program for the nourishment of every child of the farmers and fisherfolk.
This campaign should include the participation of school teachers who would implement it religiously to prevent corruption and wastage.
The Marcos Nutri-Bun and Choco-Lait program for the nourishment of school children would be a byword among all the children in the countryside that would say that Bongbong Marcos loves them.
The total effort will constitute the National Movement for Senator of Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr.
Email: artbesana@gmail.com