‘The President’s off-the-cuff comment on how to remedy the situation is to divide proposed solutions to the problems of agriculture between short-term or 3 to 6 months, and long-term which is one year and beyond.’
IN his very first press briefing in Malacañang on Tuesday, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. who is also the concurrent secretary of agriculture, admitted that the Philippines has not been producing sufficient palay (rice), corn, livestock and fish.
With just one motherhood statement, Marcos summarized the problems of Philippine agriculture and how the government has been remiss all these years in ramping up production of food for our people.
The President’s off-the-cuff comment on how to remedy the situation is to divide proposed solutions to the problems of agriculture between short-term or 3 to 6 months, and long-term which is one year and beyond. For indeed, there are things that are immediately doable today, and things that would need a year or two of gestation to bear the expected fruit.
Marcos wanted the Department of Agriculture (DA) to boost the production of rice and corn in the coming two quarters, or until the Christmas and New Year season. Corn, especially, is important because it will serve as the country’s import substitute for feed wheat for our poultry and livestock, a commodity that all but vanished from the world market with the Russian war in Ukraine still raging. Ukraine and Russia account for much of the world’s production of wheat, both for human consumption and for feed.
Also at the press briefing which he led immediately after the first Cabinet meeting at the Palace, President Marcos assured that broiler production will be enhanced with the coming together of corn producers and farmers, who were promised government assistance to meet production targets for the rest of the year.
The most telling of PBBM’s announcement is his policy of cutting down food imports to the barest minimum. He assured that the “little” importation that the country will do under his administration will not be a price stabilization measure, but rather, a strategic food supply measure. In simple words, we will import grain, fish and meat only in a small scale and almost throughout his six-year term. Local production will take the place of wanton importation that was the dominant DA policy under former President Rodrigo Duterte.
Marcos reiterated that he has made agriculture “the single, the highest priority of everything that we are doing” because he believes his administration cannot build a strong economy unless it has a robust agriculture sector.
We know by now that PBBM has chosen agriculture as his centerpiece sector, and we expect that his economic team and his allies in Congress are listening and ready to help.
