PREYING ON THE DEAD AND DYING

IF you were discerning enough or if you have farmed long enough, the first thing that you will notice about William Dar, the Agriculture secretary, is his utter and unapologetic shamelessness. Late last year, he plastered the main offices of the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Quezon City with giant tarpaulins that said, “Buy local.” That year, the country imported more than 2.2 million metric tons of rice, the top importer in the world along with China.

The previous year, the country imported a record-high 3.1 million metric tons of rice, the global record that year, some half a million tons more than China’s rice imports. That’s “Buy local, eat local” for Mr. Dar.

If the Philippines were some middling rice importer, ranked 10th or 11th, Dar’s flooding the zone with shitty slogans about buying local but doing otherwise may not get elementary scrutiny. But the grand disconnect between what was being said through the screaming tarps and what was done on the ground was so beyond the pale that even the incurious noticed.

Preaching something and doing the opposite, according to the Holy Book and Marx, is great folly. Praxis is the Marxist coinage on fusing what revolutionaries say and what revolutionaries do. In the Book of James, Christians are told that faith and words with no corresponding action and deeds is no faith at all. It is just nominal faith, which is even worse than being a heathen.

But Mr. Dar would have none of those great words of advice. He probably read too much of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump and what repeated lies and propaganda do to the gullible, and that category does not exclude pundits, who are, in theory, discerning and capable of recognizing the difference between gold and dross. At the DA, which historically is an agency with a barely functioning press arm, Mr. Dar set out to make propaganda the agency’s number one priority to create an illusion of competence and a fact-free alternate universe.

Flood the zone with shit — nonstop, with no meandering and doubt. The general public and the pundits will not even notice. Many university-based flacks have been lending their doctorates in the service of Mr. Dar’s propaganda efforts. To prop up the already massive press release factory.

But lies, as the Bard said, always end up badly.

In a stinging critique of the rice import law after its first year this March, the Federation of Free Farmers (FFF) said the orgy of importation has not only dealt misery and poverty to the close to 3 million small rice farmers but has doubtful economic benefits. The benefit to consumers has been negligible. Meanwhile, the muchheralded rice production enhancement program touted by Mr. Dar as a signature accomplishment may have increased rice production but at a grievous economic cost.

Across the board and across all benchmarks, the rice import liberalization program has been a failure, according to the FFF, whose cadre of trained researchers and analysts easily pierced through the fog of propaganda from the Dar machine. If the open importation regime did something at all, it was to enrich the unscrupulous rice importers, the only legitimate beneficiaries — and big winners — under the liberalized rice import regime.

But these hard truths hardly deterred Mr. Dar from taking advantage of the current pork shortage to propose two things to contain the shortage: Expand the MAV, the yearly minimum access volume on pork. Then, lower the pork tariff, both in-quota and out-quota to flood the country with pork imports. He proposed, and Mr. Duterte, who is clearly as clueless on the pork story as the Dar-cheering pundits, readily signed an executive order to liberalize pork imports.

Reckless imports have been the refuge of the likes of Mr. Dar. And in a governing context with an utter contempt for the small farmers and small animal raisers, importation proponents always carry the day in the policy debates. With some props, of course, from shadowy local groups organized like the Koch brothers’ libertarian, small government organizations.

Even Senate President Vicente Sotto 3rd, who has been detached from the concerns of agriculture through his lifetime, expressed concern over Mr. Dar’s overkill. Nag-expand na nga ng MAV, bakit binaba pa ang tariff ? At some point, mendacity truly gets its day of reckoning .

The pork shortage was caused by the lethal African swine fever (ASF), which was introduced into local hog farms in 2019 via infected meat, most probably from China. The ASF started wiping out local hog farms as it was nearing its peak in China, which lost $400 billion worth of hogs to ASF before containment. The DA, the agency that has zero development role in the hog industry, and was expected to exercise protection work, failed to set up border meat inspection points during the peak of the ASF rampage in China. And gave no explanation for that cavalier stand.

Hence, the ASF came with ease, devastated hog farms in Central Luzon, which with Southern Tagalog make up the two biggest hog-producing regions in the country. The province of Pampanga, Central Luzon’s biggest hog producer, has had three major waves of ASF infestations. My small backyard farm was wiped out in a few days during the third wave, which took place middle and late last year. I was too small to be in the statistics. The major farms, owned and operated by second- and thirdgeneration Tsinoys, lost big. Right now, more than P1 billion in idle hog-raising infrastructure has been left to rot in my province, some few kilometers away from Clark Freeport. And you know what, part and parcel of Mr. Dar’s propaganda is the supposed opening up of many agribusiness opportunities at the Clark Freeport, a few kilometers from the modern hog infrastructure idled by the ASF rampage.

It is both ironic and tragic that Mr. Dar, who heads the agency that fiddled while the hog farms burned, is the same apparatchik tasked to solve the pork shortage. And with Mr. Dar as the point man, you perfectly knew where policy would end up — more imports.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson said that the opening up of pork imports is the kind of crisis that crooks and scammers live for. Crooked private actors with their partners in some of the agencies of the DA will take advantage of the crisis to rake in billions of pesos via tong-pats.

So sad. After the tragedy, the vultures descend to prey on the dead.