By Jojo Robles
If President Noynoy Aquino sang the same old song, I don’t see the point in listening. And if Aquino keeps at it, the time may be nigh when no one will even care what he says anymore – which would make him irrelevant.
Because of this newspaper’s deadlines, I am unable to comment on President Noynoy Aquino’s televised speech last night. However, I think I can safely predict that there will be no radical changes announced – unless I am very much mistaken about a President whose administration I have closely followed these past three years.
If I am wrong, and But history and Aquino’s famous predictability and hardheadedness are against that happening.
After all, the last time Aquino went on national television was to announce the abolition of Congress’ pork barrel funds. Since then, and with the discovery of the even bigger Disbursement Acceleration Program that Aquino green-lighted two years ago, the President has gone on to repeatedly say that pork is good not just for lawmakers and their enablers in the Executive but for the people, as well – his original position on the matter of his giving more discretionary funds to Congress than any President in this country’s history.
I wish Aquino would shut down DAP and fire his budget secretary in his speech, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. But if he goes into full “Boy Sisi” mode and blames his fellow politicians for everything wrong that been going on in his administration instead, then I will know better than to even turn on the television and watch him talk the next time around.
Because whatever happens, I know Aquino will once again seek to address the people about current issues in the future, when the next crisis threatens to dislodge him. But will he react by making the changes that must be done, instead of once again trying to hoodwink us with motherhood statements about fake reforms and pointing fingers at his imaginary enemies?
I hope not. Because if that’s all he did last night, he may never get the chance to talk to the nation once again as President.
* * *
I wholeheartedly agree with the editorial of this newspaper yesterday, which called out Proceso Alcala, the secretary of agriculture, for hiring his former employee at the House of Representatives, Orlan Calayag, as administrator of the National Food Authority. As for Calayag, there is simply no excuse for keeping him where he is until he renounces his American citizenship.
As for this administration’s entire agricultural policy, which Alcala and Calayag are merely implementing, that needs to be revisited, as well. And the Aquino government’s program of supposedly protecting our farmers while allowing massive smuggling of rice and other agricultural products is destroying not only an important sector of the poor but is also punishing consumers of these products at the same time.
For instance, the National Economic and Development Authority has recently told us something that all consumers of the country’s staple already know: Filipinos pay twice more for the same rice that can be bought in other countries. And NFA has admitted that transporting palay from the provinces to Metro Manila adds as much as one peso per kilo to the cost of rice.
In other countries that have long opened their borders to international agricultural trade like Japan, China, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and even Vietnam, consumers buy basic agricultural products at affordable prices while their countries have improved production of export-oriented food which can be sold at higher prices.
This is no big secret: liberalizing trade in agriculture and refocusing efforts on producing export-oriented commodities accelerates productivity in the medium-term. Consumers benefit from affordable food while allowing for competitiveness in export-oriented commodities like bananas, aquaculture products and even coconuts.
And the farmers who are given the alternative of growing crops that are more profitable make more income, as well. Rice farmers who only earn an average of P16,251 per hectare, for instance, can grown onions instead and earn an average of P302,070 per hectare.
Besides, revenues from tariffs on imported agricultural products can be invested back into the agriculture sector through irrigation, farm-to-market roads, post-harvest equipment and facilities, credit, research and development, extension services, other market infrastructure. These revenues are currently foregone because of the rampant smuggling of almost all agricultural product these days.
And this is not something that the government has to pass laws to achieve. Republic Act 8178, also known as “The Agricultural Tariffication Act,” already mandates that tariffs from imported agricultural products should go to an Agricultural Competitiveness Enhancement Fund which will be used to fund agriculture development initiatives.
RA 1878 abolishes restrictions on the importation of agricultural products while protecting Filipino firms against unfair trade through the strict implementation of anti-dumping and other such measures. This law, enacted in 1996, foresaw the need to make the agricultural sector viable, efficient and globally competitive, but has never been fully implemented.
Sadly, RA 8178 has been diluted by administrative and other orders whose only purpose is to circumvent the tariffication. So everybody loses— except the Alcalas, the Calayags and the smugglers who are their true masters.
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