DISDAIN AND LOATHING FOR AGRICULTURE

AS the sad optic of tomato dumping by Ifugao farmers struggling for buyers was reported by prime time TV news, the government officially announced a fresh order of 300,000 metric tons (MT) of rice imports from Vietnam, part of the close to 700,000 MT that it has so far contracted from our Asean neighbor, which supplied us 2.1 million MT of rice last year. The tomato dumping by poor farmers with no access to the market was just “one of those things” to the government. It is the rice import contract with Vietnam that is the celebrated part.

In Benguet, which, like Ifugao, is part of the Cordillera Region, the access to the market is worse, given the diversity of the farm goods that require a decent market but are left to rot because no adequate market exists.

That the priorities of Philippine agriculture — in which rice imports are tracked regularly/ giddily by the major rice exporters given the fact that the Philippines is the top rice importer in the world — are twisted do not result in sleepless nights for the government mandarins. The government does not even have a single aspiration for the agriculture sector, except for those grand press releases that regularly boast of phantom projects. The Department of Agriculture has just rolled out a supposed “new thinking” for the agriculture sector which, in reality, is a fresh strategy to give an Orwellian front to the new normal, which is, give utmost primacy to importation of all things agriculture. The other major policy is screwing the farming class.

(It is only in rice importation where we are topping China, the official BFF of the Philippine government until mid-2022. We are first; China is second.)

What the government has for the agriculture sector consists of two words: “disdain” and “loathing.” What kind of government, do you think, would fail at the elementary task of connecting upland farmers from remote provinces to the markets yet celebrate the successful negotiation of another round of rice imports from Vietnam? (Open nanamanang Vietnam, yehey!) And in this season of Covid hell, with the scarcity of fresh produce like tomatoes in the food-short metropolitan areas. The seamless flow of vegetables from the production centers to the foodshort metropolis would benefit both origin and end-users (farmers and consumers) but such basic function of government has been abandoned so as to focus the energies of the bureaucracy on the import mania.

The disdain and loathing of the executive branch for agriculture is only topped by the unfathomable grief over the relentless bludgeoning of the agri sector by the legislative branch. Exhibit A is this: the head of the congressional oversight for agri is a billionaire land developer. As they often say, “Only in the Philippines “do such things take place. Except for farm groups, no one pays attention to the massive conversion of prime agricultural lands into residential developments.

And the tortured list of the deliberate, officially sponsored efforts to screw the agriculture sector has many specific items that qualify under the “Only in the Philippines” category. For example this: the third to fourth largest commercial bank in the country, the Land Bank of the Philippines, was created to specifically serve the lending needs of small-scale agriculture and agrarian reform beneficiaries ( ARBs). Not only does the bank starve the small farmers and agrarian reform beneficiaries of loans. It was also one of the large Philippine banks that lent billions of pesos of unsecured loans to a bankrupt South Korean shipbuilder, Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construc

tion Philippines Inc. On farm loans, it does a lot of lending trickery. A small loan to a rural cooperative is made to appear as a loan to tens of thousands of small farmers. Of course, such obvious trickery does not wash. Under Republic Act 1000, the law on agri lending, ARBs should get at least 10 percent of the total loans of the banking system every year, with the lending bannered — in theory — by LandBank.

Yet, year in and year out, the total loans that flow into the ARBs does not even breach 1 percent of the total loan portfolio of banks. The reason is the banks would rather pay fines and violate the law (over P6 billion in fines in two years) than lend to agrarian reform beneficiaries. In the advertorials of LandBank, an alternate lending universe of credit- adequate small farming sector is painted, all lies and deception, of course.

The disdain and loathing for the small people who till the soil, like this typist, knows no bounds, and adherence to this policy of cruelty to the small is so ingrained that you can write a manual on this.

The disdain and loathing for agriculture would have been obscured by an environment of plenty, cheap and abundant food items, led by rice which is cheap and easily accessible in the global market. Not this time. The Covid hell has resurrected the archived concept of food nationalism, countries restricting what they sell on the global market, with domestic supply as the main priority. Before it reined in the novel coronavirus, Vietnam temporarily suspended rice exports. It resumed exports just recently. Russia has suspended its wheat exports. Laos and Cambodia are likewise planning export restrictions.

Thailand, another traditional exporter, is also cutting down on rice exports, citing many reasons. What if China suddenly decides to up its rice imports? The thin global surplus of rice exports would disappear within days and the Philippines will dry out of rice to buy.

A leadership conscious of these domestic and international realities in agriculture should have used this time of crisis to ramp up food production and food security. The timing is also right; rainfall has drenched the dried-up farms in the Luzon areas. With just the minimum of incentives, farmers will start inspired farming anew.

But what we see are those shallow, inconsequential programs — phony at the very least — that promote “urban farming” and “organic farming.”

Those are not the kind of farming we need for food security. Invoking “urban farming” and “organic farming” is just adding flights of fancy to the officially sponsored disgust and loathing for the agriculture sector.

Ok, the final insult to the agriculture sector. The coronavirus pandemic should have been the proper context to move budgets from other departments to food production. What the government did was to slash the meager budget of the agri sector by P11.7 billion. The cut is an existential threat to national food security, but clueless policymaking shambles along with no regard for the harsh consequences.