Bongbong Marcos orders revival of dad’s ‘Masagana 99’

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. along with his wife, First Lady Liza, and son, Joseph Simon at the Goldenberg Mansion during the ceremonial opening of the Malacañang Heritage Tours in Manila on May 30, 2023. INQUIRER PHOTO / NIÑO JESUS ORBETA

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has approved a plan to redo a rice production program called “Masagana 99” that his father, deceased former President Ferdinand Marcos, implemented in 1973.

The President explained to rice industry stakeholders on Wednesday, May 31, that the Masagana Rice Industry Development Program aims to reach 97.5 percent rice sufficiency in five years.

“I don’t think it has to be 100 percent … But I think 97.5 is a good enough number,” Marcos said during a Rice Industry Convergence Meeting in Quezon City.

“You don’t have to really go to 100 percent because the 3 percent are other niche products, organic ones, special grains, Japanese rice, things like that,” he said.

“At 97 percent, we can say that we can feed all our countrymen with enough rice and supplies,” Marcos added.

READ: IN THE KNOW: Masagana 99

Press Secretary Cheloy Velicaria-Garafil said the President made the announcement after he approved the program, obviously modeled after Masagana 99 which was implemented in 1973 amid a rice supply shortage.

The program, executed alongside an intensified land reform drive, involved government-backed funding for new technologies developed by the International Rice Research Institute, founded only a decade prior.

The program also involved the use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides that were later found to be harmful to health.

READ: LP solon backs Marcos agri push, but says ‘Masagana 99’ must be tweaked

By 1976, the government said farmers were producing bumper harvests unseen in generations—a claim still disputed today.

Unpaid loans

However, the lack of continuing support for the program caused inexperienced farmers to default on their loans, leading to the sale of farmland they had just received from the government and widespread bank failures.

In a Senate hearing in 2020, former Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III, who was agriculture secretary from 1987 to 1989, claimed that he “cleaned up a mess” of 800 rural banks going bankrupt because of unpaid loans.

READ: Dominguez rebuts Marcos on Masagana 99 feat: ‘I cleaned up the mess’

However, as finance minister from 2016-2022, Dominguez was also responsible for the government’s policy of agricultural importation that ruined thousands of rice, corn, hog, chicken, and sugar farmers all over the country.

Former Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol claimed that he advised against the long-term consequences of the all-out importation policy, but he was replaced.

That episode also directly caused the crop shortages, whether real or imagined, that the country is experiencing at this time.

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