PRESDIENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is promoting “balanced fertilization” with the aim of increasing rice growth and production in the country, an official of the Department of Agricultural (DA) said on Friday.
In a press briefing at Malacañang, Agriculture Undersecretary Leocadio Sebastian said the DA recently issued Memorandum Order No. 32 embodying the guidelines on the distribution and use of biofertilizers to boost farmers’ productivity and rice output.
“Our rice production here in the Philippines, we saw last year, we had problems with the high prices of fertilizers, those inputs. And we saw in the Department of Agriculture, we need to find a way that we don’t rely too much on imported inorganic fertilizer,” Sebastian said.
“One more thing, the quality of our soil, when I was looking at it, I was analyzing our situation here in the Philippines, the soil fertility is also failing – the health of the soil. Our farmers know this. Even though we are pouring in… we have fertilizer subsidies, we have certified seeds that are being distributed, we see that it is not improving much because the health of our soil is failing,” the DA official noted.
With the promotion of the “balanced fertilization,” Sebastian said the farmers would be using organic fertilizer as basal with biofertilizer to improve the growth of rice seedlings.
“And the biofertilizer also harvests, you take nitrogen from the air or the soil, and convert it into nitrogen that the plant gets. Then there is still additional urea. So that’s what we call balanced fertilization,” Sebastian explained.
“Balanced fertilization involves the use of organic fertilizer, biofertilizer, and inorganic fertilizer – that’s a combination. So that is our program that we want to spread and so that we can maintain our rice production here in the Philippines. Because we have to make our rice production more sustainable not only today but also in the future,” he said.
Sebastian also said the country’s continued use of inorganic fertilizer was “unsustainable” and production was “plateauing.”
He added that the memorandum order was issued to avoid another “fertilizer scam” that dragged several DA regional directors into the controversy.
“That memorandum of yours is for us to avoid what we fear are fertilizer scams again. Because we avoid what happened in the past,
because we already know the lesson of that,” Sebastian said.
“So we don’t want a repeat of that fertilizer scam, that’s why we have developed this guideline so that we can have a fair, transparent and
sure implementation or our implementation is good so that we can attain good outcomes no matter what.” of using biofertilizer,” he added.
The scam involved the diversion of some P728 million in fertilizer funds to the political campaign in 2004 general elections.
