The ‘sound of silence’ in the DA

MORE than a month ago, a “gag order” was issued by Agriculture Senior Undersecretary Domingo Panganiban instructing all Department of Agriculture (DA) staff to decline any interview by the media or issue statements to the media without prior approval from his office.

My fellow columnist (from another paper), Cito Beltran, noted that this is a bad decision because the “gag order” seems to treat media as an adversary. In fact, he stressed that media should be treated as a partner by the DA in informing the public about its plans and activities. Which Cito did in the past by offering his column and radio/TV program as platforms that the DA can use to disseminate information on what is happening to the agriculture sector.

I believe that Cito is not alone among media practitioners who feels this way, given that disseminating up-to-date and accurate information on key issues faced by the public is a sacred duty of media.

Indeed, the “gag order” is so ill-advised and ill-timed because the country is facing a food crisis, to which DA plays a major role in addressing this challenge. While the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) provides data on the performance of the agricultural sector, they are not real-time data.

They are released primarily on a quarterly basis, making it difficult to provide solutions to real-time problems hounding the agriculture sector.

It is for this reason why we need regular and up-to-date reports from the DA. It is a cardinal principle in good communication to keep the communication lines open in times of crisis to ensure that the public is informed about the extent of the problem we are facing and what authorities are doing in response.

Unfortunately, the “gag order” prevents us from having real-time information, particularly in the food crisis we are facing right now.

Unchallenged regulation

For instance, we just found out that the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) recently prohibited the selling of imported pink salmon and pompano (pomfret) in wet markets. It announced that those fish are only for the consumption of “industrial users” like canneries, hotels and restaurants.

Note, however, the BFAR, an agency under the DA, expanded the definition of “wet markets” to include “supermarkets” and “online markets” through a legal opinion it issued in 2020. This is tantamount to limiting supply of imported pink salmon and pompano to “industrial users” only, and in the process, depriving the Filipino consumers access to these fish species.

What is the scientific basis for this prohibition? Does BFAR only want the rich to eat these relatively expensive fish species and relegate the poor (who patronize the wet markets) to consume the lowly tilapia?

Well, BFAR announced that the measure is a way of protecting (i.e., shielding from competition) our poor fishers from imported fish despite the common knowledge that prices of capture (sea) fish are now beyond the reach of the poor consumers, including galunggong (round scad). Undoubtedly, the impact of the measure is to further enrich commercial fishers cum importers who were awarded allocation by BFAR from the recently approved 25,000 metric tons (MT) of fish imports. Because of lack of competition as a result of the ban on imported salmon and pompano, imported fish from the 25,000 MT import quota will simply skyrocket given huge deficit in capture fish supply.

On another pressing issue, how can we explain that sugar prices remain sticky high when assurances were already made by DA officials that prices will start going down this month because of the arrival of imported sugar and the milling harvested cane now? What is the reason why prices cannot be reduced from the current high of around P100 per kilo for refined sugar to its previous price of P52 per kilo prior to the shortage we experience at the second half of this year?

I could go on with questions on issues that DA needs to clarify to the public but they will remain unanswered because of the imposition of the “sound of silence” (with an apology to Simon and Garfunkel) in the department. Which leads me to surmise that there are probably two main reasons why the Agriculture department cannot provide satisfactory responses to these questions.

First, there is really no appreciation on the part of the current DA leadership of data or evidence-based decision-making. If they do, the agency can easily cite official data to support its claim that we have ample supply of basic food products. Unfortunately, official data reveal the contrary situation and hence,

DA cannot resort to evidencebased presentation to support its claim. Based on this empirically unsupported claim, it goes on to declare that there is no need for the country to import more food commodities because of the imperative of protecting our poor farmers and fishers. But what about protecting the 110 million Filipino consumers, half whom consider themselves poor, from rising hunger and malnutrition due to high food prices?

And second, the current DA leadership seems to have limited knowledge on the technical aspect of the workings of the agriculture sector in the 21st century. Just look at the series of conflicting, verging on the ridiculous, statements made in the past. There was this statement castigating garlic farmers from Batanes for overproduction. This is the first time that I heard, here and abroad, that a top agriculture official blaming the farmers for overproduction. Lest it be forgotten, the top responsibility of a DA official is to promote higher agricultural productivity.

Then the claim that sugar prices would stabilize in September because it was the cane harvest month, which did not happen. Followed up by the assessment that we could only determine the extent of the sugar shortfall after December, as if there is no business course on supply and demand projections.

The worst is the declaration that there will no rice importation by the end of the last quarter of this year. As of end of October, around 3.2 million MT of imported rice arrived in the Philippines. This is around a million MT higher than the import arrivals during the first 10 months of 2021.

As such, it would be nothing short of a “Trumpian”-like disaster if a DA senior official faces the media for an interview equipped with this kind of knowledge on the workings of our agriculture sector and the extent of the food crisis the country is now facing. Precisely, the need for a gag order. But in the end, the public is the loser with this decision by the current DA leadership.