Sen. Cynthia Villar questioned the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) move to scrap its subsidy program to give way to a credit financing scheme for farmers.
At the Senate hearing on the agency’s budget on Monday, Villar, chair of the committee on agriculture and food, said she could not “allow a policymaking body to give out money.”
For 2019, the agriculture department proposed to increase the allocation for its credit arm by 200 percent to P3.5 billion from P1.17 billion this year.
The department saw a 10-percent reduction in its 2019 budget to P55.99 billion from P62.48 billion this year.
Gov’t savings
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said the shift was aimed at saving the government billions of pesos, as the subsidy programs were costing the government a lot.
This is in contrast with access financing, which, according to Piñol, has been welcomed by farmers’ cooperatives.
The agriculture department also noted good repayment rates from local producers.
The department’s current loan programs showed a 100-percent repayment rate for beneficiaries of the Program for Unified Lending to Agriculture and a 96-percent repayment rate for those availing themselves of the Production Loan Easy Access program.
Villar said the agriculture department must focus on helping farmers mechanize production to entice the younger generation to go into agriculture.