Piñol to tap full agri potential of poor, neglected provinces
COTABATO CITY – Incoming Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel “Manny” Piñol vowed to intensify government interventions in the countryside, and boost the economic and agricultural productivity of poor provinces like Samar.
Piñol made the assurance after spending over the weekend a leg of his current “Biyaheng Bukid” in the Samar region, which he tagged as “an island of ironies” stemming allegedly from its local government units’ “twisted mindset.”
Piñol embarked on his “Biyaheng Bukid” sorties after presumptive President Duterte named him agriculture secretary last week, starting first with his North Cotabato home-province, in a bid to be freshly abreast with the pulse of Filipino peasants.
“After President Duterte has assumed office, I will go back to Samar and lead the transformation of this very rich but poor island into a major food producer for the country,” he said, pointing out that Samar is a paradise and (its) people should live happily ever after.”
Priorities, priorities “I saw poverty along the way. People were queuing up for water in a small faucet along the road but there were so many covered basketball courts built using tens of millions of people's money,” Piñol said in his statement posted on Facebook yesterday, referring to his travel across Samar provinces.
He blamed the problem to “the twisted mindset in local governance now which is slowly spreading in the countryside like a deadly disease paralyzing rural development and thwarting efforts to address poverty.”
“This is the same illness which brought back my home province, North Cotabato, to the ignominious club of poorest provinces in the country from a lofty rating of No. 27 among the Top 30 in previous years,” he said.
Poor, rich island In his Facebook post tilted “Confronting Samar challenge: Massive poverty in a rich island,” Piño recalled having seen the same poverty problem in Samar provinces during his travels in the region in early 1980s as journalist working for the Philippine News Agency and later with the Manila Bulletin / Tempo.
With an area of 1.3-million hectares and endowed with so much resources, Samar's three major local government units - Western Samar / Samar, Northern Samar and Eastern Samar – belong to the country's 10 poorest provinces because of their local governance’s failure to harness the region’s soil for agricultural development, he said.
Eastern Samar is the poorest in the island and the second poorest in the Philippines with 55.4% poverty incidence, while Western and Northern Samar share identical poverty rate of 43.5%, meaning over 43 out of every 100 families are below the poverty threshold which is about 11,000-peso yearly per capita, he said.
In spite of its proximity to Cebu and Manila metropolitan centers, Samar region “has not fully exploited its potentials” to become “a major producer of food for the hungry mouths” within it, said Piñol, who claimed to have encountered and remedied similar neglect of agricultural concerns during his nine-year gubernatorial stint in North Cotabato.