Fiddling while hog industry burned

HERE is one fact about the hog industry that people outside of the hog industry are clueless about: the Department of Agriculture (DA) has zero support role, development-wise, in the industry. The hog raisers raise hogs by themselves, do farm biosecurity work by themselves, select and procure their own animal health technologies (from veterinary drugs to feed formulation), and build their hog raising-infrastructure according to the needs of their production sites (temperate Batangas may require physical structures that are a bit different from the needs of hot and dry Pampanga).

Even the permits and legal requirements to operate have nothing to do with the DA, contrary to the layman’s perception that the agency has been heavily involved in the hog industry. For example, these are what you need to operate a hog farm anywhere in the country:

– A zoning clearance from the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HULRB) that classifies your raising site as “agro-industrial.” Or, located in a barangay (village) specified by the town council as open to agri-business enterprises, from poultry to hog to feeder-cattle raising on a commercial scale. All towns in the country, except for heavily urbanized ones, usually have one barangay that is open for agri-enterprises such as hog and poultry raising.

– The Environmental Compliance Certificate is granted by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) after a guarantee that no water source is polluted by the dung and sediments. And that the farm has a HULRB certification for agro-industrial purposes. Except in very remote towns with very little population, no new argi-raising permits are granted by the DENR on applications that are outside of the barangay designated for raising hogs, poultry and cattle.

– The munisipyo (town) that approves the following: mayor’s permit, business permit, health and sanitary permit. You must get all three and to get them, a barangay clearance is a prerequisite.

After getting all these permits and clearances, you can build the facilities, stock the facilities then start operations. Once operational, the farm must file quarterly water discharge reports to the Environmental Management Bureau of the DENR to make sure the farm is not polluting water sources.

Simply put, the DA has zero involvement in the process. From Day 1 of operations to the day of closure, a hog or chicken farmer will not deal with the DA. When a farm ceases to operate, the “decommissioning permit” is granted by the assessors office of the municipality and you must pay a substantial fee.

President Duterte and the chairmen of both the Senate and House agriculture committees are probably not aware of these facts.

Given the zero involvement — and zero investment — of the DA in these critical agri subsectors, it is expected that it would, at the very least, protect these agri subsectors from the external challenges such as epidemics and pestilence. Before the African swine fever (ASF) rampaged across the country and wiped out 85 percent of Pampanga’s hog industry, one of the biggest raisers, the hog industry was the eighth largest in the world. An agri subsector that takes nothing from the government and contributes many things, from price stability of pork to employment generation, should, again at the very least, incentivize the government to provide it full protection.

Hog raisers did not get that from the DA. As the ASF steamrolled the industry, the mendacious William Dar, the Agriculture secretary, issued dozens of press releases to paper over the crisis, or to project — it has been all projection and phantom action — that the DA is doing something to contain the crisis and the fallout from it.

The last inventory from hog industry groups said more than 40 percent of the country’s hog stock has been wiped out by the ASF, with the loss placed at P135 billion or more. And it is a pestilence with no end in sight. My own backyard farm was wiped out in the August-September 2020 rampage in Pampanga, during the so-called “third wave” of the lethal ASF. Because I was small and backyard, I was probably not even part of the statistics on total loss.

While Mr. Dar was directing his press flacks to literally flood the zone with verbal dung--in the process duping many clueless pundits — the hog industry groups found that the DA does not even have functional, science-guided border inspection units at the port zones, which means that the quality of pork imported from overseas is not being inspected as to safety and quality. On the one thing it could do to help the hog industry, the mendacious Mr. Dar and his DA failed to deliver.

The ASF, and this is the consensus from hog raisers, sneaked in through imported meat from China and this spread like wildfire across the hog-raising areas in the country as Mr. Dar and his flunkies were bombarding media outlets with press releases on supposed proactive measures.

With the devastated hog farms a done deal, deeply hurting in its wake those who made a living supplying hog farms with raw materials (from veterinary drugs to suppliers of rice bran, to small salt farmers) and the retail outlets and the pera padala that farm workers patronize, what came next was a development of both irony and tragedy. The mendacious Mr. Dar, whose DA has zero involvement in the hog industry, was made the point man of efforts to stabilize pork supply and prices.

Of course, what Mr. Dar did was entirely predictable. Increase pork imports via lower tariffs, the same old and tired formula used in the Rice Tariff Law. Import surges are the refuge of the clueless and incompetent and that is what Mr. Dar is.

Now, the Senate is looking into allegations that corruption may be a central and built-in feature of the pork-import scheme. The expose from Sen. Francis Pangilinan was a shocker and confirmed what hog industry groups have been saying all along — pork smuggling is rampant, through the ports, through the porous borders, while Dar and his press flacks have been merrily churning out press releases at the DA media factory and networking with clueless pundits. And playing dumb to the existence of corruption in pork imports.

Corruption on top of an epic fail. You can only weep for our sad country.