Saying that the national government budget for agriculture should at least be four percent of the gross domestic product in order to ensure food security, a senior lawmaker on Tuesday called for an P88 billion increase in the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) proposed budget for 2025.
Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte said it is necessary to significantly raise agriculture spending beginning next year to fund priority initiatives such as building irrigation and postharvest facilities, food terminals or processing centers, as well as Kadiwa outlets nationwide.
“For our country to eventually attain food security, if not sufficiency, the annual budget for agriculture needs to go up in 2025 by at least one percentage point to four percent of our GDP (gross domestic product), or equivalent to P88 billion,” Villafuerte said.
He suggested at a recent hearing of the House committee on appropriations on the proposed agriculture budget of P200.19 billion for next year that an extra outlay of P88 billion is needed so the DA can, among others, spend another P25 billion on irrigation, including solar facilities; P10 billion apiece for postharvest facilities and for palay productivity programs; and P8 billion for cold storage facilities.
Villafuerte said that portions of the remaining P35-billion additional allocation for 2025 should go to building fishports (P4 billion) and food terminal facilities at one facility per region (P4 billion), for an intensive production of coconuts (P3 billion) and high-value crops (P1 billion), for livestock development (P2 billion), and for building more Kadiwa stores (P1 billion).
He said that inadequate funding for the agriculture sector led to supply and pricing problems on rice and other farm goods, which, in turn, caused upward pressures on inflation that hurt most especially the ordinary consumers.
“And the solution, basically, is to increase the budget of the DA,” rather than decrease it, said Villafuerte at the budget hearing presided over by appropriations committee vice chairman and Navotas City Rep. Tobias Tiangco.
The DA originally proposed to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) a budget of P518.8 billion for next year under the National Expenditure Program (NEP) or General Appropriations bill (GAB) that Malacañang eventually submitted to the 19th Congress following the opening of its third and final session.
