Whose interest does Cynthia Villar serve?

THE most notorious moments of retiring and termed-out Sen. Cynthia Villar in the Senate were usually on occasions when she berates resource persons who had the misfortune of displeasing her. One of these was when she belittled the research being conducted by government agencies, boasting of her being an intelligent person, yet she could not understand the importance of such research activities.

Ironically, Villar takes pride in her authorship of the Rice Tariffication Law, or Republic Act 11203, and its component Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF), where revenues collected from the imposition of tariffs on imported rice are spent on things that would require scientific research. Fifty percent of the RCEF is earmarked to the Philippine Center for Post-harvest Development and Modernization to provide farmers with rice farm machinery and equipment. Any intelligent person should know that research and development is an important requirement to perform this task.

Thirty percent of RCEF is to be spent by the Philippine Rice Research Institute for the development, propagation and promotion of inbred rice seeds to rice farmers. Again, this requires research. After all, Philrice, by its very name, is a rice research institute.

Recently, she berated the protected areas superintendent of the Chocolate Hills Natural Monument, a career forester, and accused her of incompetence for allowing private resorts to be established within what she thought were parts of the protected area. Had Villar conducted her own research, she would not have missed the glaring fact that 97.5 percent of the areas she thinks are within the natural monument are already classified as alienable and disposable lands and that most of these resorts are in titled lands.

After being informed of this, Villar then pooh-poohed the landowners and dismissed their situation as merely unfortunate, perhaps as unfortunate as those being pressured to sell their lands to land developers who would like to convert them into malls and subdivisions. For someone in the real estate development industry and has converted agricultural land to malls, Villar must have, at the very least, understood and showed empathy for private landowners who would like to convert their titled lands that are marginally productive into resorts.

It is even more enraging that Villar, as chairman of the Senate committee concerned, has consistently sat on the proposed National Land Use Act, a law that would have drawn the permanent boundaries of forest lands and protected areas. Such a law would have established the metes and bounds delimiting which areas are forest lands and protected areas and which are agricultural lands that can be constitutionally converted into alienable and disposable lands.

The 1987 Constitution is very clear. Section 4 of Article XII has provided: “The Congress shall, as soon as possible, determine by law the specific limits of forest lands and national parks, marking clearly their boundaries on the ground. Thereafter, such forest lands and national parks shall be conserved and may not be increased nor diminished, except by law.” This was in 1987, and the framers used the phrase “as soon as possible” to indicate the urgency of the matter. However, and thanks to Villar, it is already 2024, 37 years after the ratification of the Constitution, and yet the National Land Use Act has not been passed. The House approved the bill on third and final reading in 2021, but it died in Villar’s committee, so it had to be refiled in the current Congress. Again, the House approved on third reading the proposed law in May 2023, but it is, again, still pending in Villar’s committee in the Senate.

As if this dilatory tactic is not enough, Villar has also allowed every proposal to revise the 1975 Revised Forestry Reform Code, which was issued by thenpresident Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. through Presidential Decree 705, to die in her committee. In 2021, during the last Congress, the Sustainable Forest Management bill was approved by the House on third and final reading but remained pending in Villar’s committee, so it had to be refiled in the current Congress. In the face of emerging new problems, and of the wood shortage that is now being experienced in the country where almost 70 percent of our wood requirements are now imported, and of a forestry curriculum that appears to be heading toward multiple directions, effectively neglecting sustainable timber production in favor of climate change mitigation, the absence of an updated forest management law is potentially damaging to the interest of the sector, and of the country as a whole.

And now, Villar is reported to be opposing attempts to amend the Rice Tariffication Law, which will allow the government, through the National Food Authority (NFA), to intervene in the market in cases where rice prices increase excessively or acute rice shortages occur. The proposed amendment would allow NFA to procure locally milled rice and would have the option of purchasing a certain percentage of rice from accredited importers at cost, insurance and freight (CIF)-landed price, as declared by the importer. And if these measures are not enough, the NFA, after seeking permission from the President, would be allowed to directly import rice. These measures would help alleviate domestic supply gaps and stabilize the national rice supply, which will then help manage inflation in rice prices. To protect local farmers, the RCEF will be tweaked to rationalize the support package for agricultural modernization. All of these will continue under the same regime of allowing rice importation under a tariff system as originally prescribed in RA 11203, except that now the government’s hands are no longer tied and can make moves to counter the inflationary effects of rice if solely sourced from traders and importers.

So, whose interest does Villar serve?

All of these proposed bills are attempts to serve the interest of the people. Villar has already allowed the land use and sustainable forest management bills to die in her committee. Let us all hope that she will not do the same to the proposed amendment to RA 11203.