President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. | PHOTO: Official Facebook page of the Presidential Communications Office
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Friday visited two provinces in Northern Luzon and turned over almost half a billion pesos in cash aid to farmers and fisherfolk hit by El Niño earlier this year.
The President also made stops at Ilocos Norte, his home province, to inaugurate a small reservoir irrigation project and a rice processing facility for farmers.
“Your government will not stop in implementing projects and programs that seek to improve the lives of our farmers and fishermen, the heroes of the day. I only ask that we cooperate and help each other so that we will attain our aspirations,” he said.
READ: Marcos distributes P288.41 million in cash aid to Visayas LGUs
In Pangasinan, the President also distributed certificates of condonation with release of mortgages to around 64,241 agrarian reform beneficiaries whose P3.68 billion worth of loans were condoned as mandated in Republic Act No. 11953, or the Agrarian Emancipation Act.
“These certificates are the fulfillment of our promise to erase the debts of our agrarian reform beneficiaries,” Mr. Marcos said.
The President said 3,558 land reform beneficiaries from the Ilocos region will be exempted from paying P50.56 million in debt while 60,683 beneficiaries in the Cordillera, Cagayan Valley and Central Luzon regions would no longer have to pay their loans worth P3.175 billion.
Mr. Marcos said the damage to the agriculture sector reached P1.24 billion in the Cordillera Administrative Region and P559 million in the Ilocos region.
He first visited Luna, Apayao, to turn over aid and farm outputs to El Niño-affected farmers in the Cordillera Administrative Region, as well as P264.2 million in cash aid from Malacañang to the region’s six provinces.