By Danilo P. Padua, PhD
The agriculture sector is still the main backbone of Philippine economy, like it or not. So where it goes, that’s where the country goes too.
This reality is lost in the coconut shell of many of our lawmakers.
According to statistics, there were roughly 500,000 hectares of prime agricultural land (mainly devoted to rice) converted to other purposes in recent years. This leaves us with only about 9 million hectares of land available for agricultural production to feed our almost 115 million current population.
That is one of our problems in food production. It is crying to be attended to pronto. Problem is, our National Land Use map law, that could somehow address this situation is lingering in the shelves of Congress.
The pressure is for us to make that area efficiently producing for our local needs. For our food sovereignty. With our current technologies in use, and almost lackadaisical attitude towards this problem, we could just bid good bye to our food sovereignty. We will just be like Singapore, which is reliant on food imports. Understandable for them because they don’t have land for production purposes. They even import soil from other ASEAN states for potted plants purposes.
It’s a sad reality, that we have the resources but we can not use them properly.
The corruption issues that made us unforgivably famous around the world at the moment, has a lot to do with it. We need farm to market roads, and these were accordingly allocated with necessary budgets. Turned out that those roads were never completed or were ghosted. Budgets magically disappeared as per some investigations. Said budgets though were not downloaded to the DA.
We needed to produce not only more rice and corn but also more vegetables and fruits for our citizens. Nada. The use of modern production technology is being sidetracked here and there, when they are perceived to be of little benefit to the pockets of a few -and some of those are even not officials of the agriculture agency. So, talking of land production efficiency becomes just a figment of our imagination.
Due to lack of food production for our people, it is no wonder that we are always at the bottom of an evaluation by the Programme of International Student Assessment. This is unfortunate considering that we have very good officials and teachers. Their enthusiasm and their proven capabilities are no match to the lack of proper food for the students that eroded their potential for learning.
There is an alarming report by the World Bank that nine out of ten Filipino students have “learning poverty”. That is, 9 of 10 can read and write but can not understand what they are reading. Now talk of the youths as the future of the Fatherland as Jose Rizal wrote more than a cent!
A friend way back in school said: “Corruption has stolen the future of our children”!
By the way, I visited for the third time, a privately-owned vegetable trading center just a mere 50m away from the first Vegetable Trading Post in La Trinidad, Benguet.
Just curious to see how vegetables arrived, unloaded, repacked and traded. Inarea, I think it is as big or slightly bigger than that of the Trading Post. So one can just imagine the volume of vegetables that are unloaded.
The veggie vehicle is first enlisted in either Wangal or Bayabas areas before they are allowed to proceed to the area to have smoother flow of vehicles and prevent huge traffic in the highway; no congestion. They are given a number based on the time they arrived. Then the unload the vegetables, wrap and repacked it them after some disposers have inspected and accordingly sold them.
I asked people if farmers can sell directly to buyers. Answer is negative. They really have to pass through the disposers when the veggie arrives.
They are allowed to also sell in the area but at a minimum of ten kilos for every kind.
When I inquired why they are not directly going to the Trading Post, I was told it will take 2-3 days for them to dispose their veggies which is unacceptable to them as losses maybe incurred due to wastage. I was told too that nobody is recording the kinds and volume of veggies that are unloaded there. And to think that there are other smaller private trading posts in the town. With this, I wonder how accurate is the recording of vegetable production and marketing of produce is being done.
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