Villar wants bigger budget for livestock sector

DAVAO CITY – Senator Cynthia Villar, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Food, said she wants a bigger allocation for the livestock sector from the proposed R60-billion budget of the Department of Agriculture (DA) for 2018 because “it is not fair for livestock program to get a small percentage of the budget when it contributed 33 percent of the entire production of the agricultural sector.”

“The budget should be commensurate to the revenue contribution of an industry,” she said during the Davao Agri-Trade Expo (DATE) on Friday at the SMX Convention Center Davao.

She said Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel “Manny” Piñol has agreed to increase the budget for livestock to R5 billion for next year from the original R1.2 billion, which comprises only two percent of the proposed DA budget.

She decried the previous practice wherein the National Livestock Program got only a small portion of the National Expenditure Program (NEP) compared to R6 billion for the Fisheries Development Program and R11.8 billion for the National Rice Program.

Villar said agriculture was “not only about rice or vegetables,” and emphasized that equal attention must be given to its other components such as livestock, poultry and dairy, and fisheries.

She said crops make up 50 percent of the total agricultural production, followed by livestock, poultry and dairy at 33 percent and then fisheries at 15 percent.

Villar added that a bigger budget for livestock will also enable the sector to increase the production of milk in the country that only stands at one percent annually, while the other 99 percent of national requirement continues to be imported from other countries.