Like the rest of the campaigning that preceded it, the recent first presidential candidates’ debate – the one held in Cagayan de Oro City on Feb. 16, 2016 – was replete with motherhood declarations and woefully short of detailed statements. Typical of the state of affairs was the treatment of the subject of this country’s agricultural sector.
The five candidates, without exception, spoke of the high importance of the agricultural sector to the elimination of poverty in this country and of how they would ensure that adequate resources were budgeted for the development of Philippine countryside. That was all they said. No details about the inadequacies and obstacles that Filipino farmers and fisherfolk faced and about what needed to be done so that the agriculture sector would no longer be the worst-performing sector of the Philippine economy.
The devil, as the expression goes, is in the details, and one of the details that this election’s presidential candidates have not wanted to get into is water. Not nearly enough of Philippine farms are irrigated. Given this country’s two climatic periods – the dry season and the less dry season – Philippine farms are deluged during the less dry season and starved for water during the remainder of the year. And that’s the normal situation. When the El Niño phenomenon strikes, as it is currently doing, multiply the problem many times.
Of late, there has been a revival of the debate among economists as to whether self-sufficiency should be the object of government policy with regard to rice supply. Several respected economists have been arguing that if other countries, like Thailand and Vietnam can produce rice less expensively, the Philippines should just import from them the Filipino’s preferred grain and divert resources to the production of other crops, especially those with higher value and export potential, e.g., coffee and fruits.
This point of view suggests that its proponents believe that the Filipino farmer is incapable of producing rice as efficiently as farmers in nearby countries. Is this viewpoint valid?
I don’t think so, and I have said so in a number of recent columns. It is my view that the Filipino farmer can produce rice competitively and that if he has not been able to do so, it is because his counterparts in mainland Southeast Asia have the benefit of year-round irrigation. Thai and Vietnamese farms don’t have to undergo the be-submerged-then-be-parched production cycle that Philippine farms have to endure. That’s because of the dependable flow of water from the mighty Mekong River and its tributaries.
An economic study that I saw not so long ago stated that the Philippines has close to fifty rivers of significance. Northern Luzon and Bicol are particularly blessed. Of course, in Mindanao, there is the Rio Grande de Mindanao and the Agus River and their tributaries.
One of the oldest components of the Department of Agriculture is National Irrigation Administration. If NIA were better managed and enjoyed greater budgetary priority, this country’s farms would be adequately and dependably watered, would be able to produce more crops in a two-year production cycle and then would be able to produce rice as efficiently as the mainland Southeast Asian countries.
Inadequate irrigation has always been the bane of Philippine farms and of the Filipino farmer’s existence. Year after year irrigation is discussed in the DA budgetary request and in the Congressional hearings on that request. But nothing much happens. And so Filipino farmers continue having to do with inadequate water for their farms. And the DA happily continues to place orders for foreign rice.
Hey, presidential candidates, if you’re really interested in improving the status of the Philippine agricultural sector and want to go beyond making motherhood statements, talk about irrigation. That will make the farmers and the economists think that you’re being serious.
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