Gov’t targets poor farmers for subsidy plans

LA TRINIDAD, Benguet—Malacañang plans to step up its antipoverty initiative by helping improve the income of poor farmers.

Budget Secretary Florencio Abad said Malacañang has released P625 million to finance a national targeting survey of farmers in the provinces.

Like the ongoing National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction, which helped “put a name, a face and an address to the country’s 5.2 million poor,” the survey being undertaken by the National Statistics Office and the National Statistical Coordination Board would provide profiles of farmers for a still undisclosed project aimed at raising their daily income.

Abad announced this to presidents of state universities and colleges in the Cordillera and the Ilocos region during an assembly at the Benguet State University here on Saturday.

He consulted the school officials about ideas that could improve farm science courses, and encourage more students to invest in a career in agriculture.

Agriculture is one of the five banner industries that President Aquino has elected to support, he said. The other four are tourism, electronics and semiconductor trade, business process outsourcing and infrastructure.

Abad said the government has doubled the irrigation budget from P12 billion in 2011 to P25 billion in 2012 to help improve crop production.

Aquino also directed the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to pave all national roads and complete all farm-to-market access routes by 2014, he said, adding that the DPWH is getting a 27-percent increase in its 2012 budget to augment the agency’s logistics.

He said he reviewed previous farm subsidy appropriations and discovered that the allocations never benefited their intended beneficiaries.

“We have spent billions of pesos each year to help the agricultural sector, including the mandate for the National Food Authority (NFA) to buy palay grown by poor farmers,” he said.

But when the government commissioned the World Bank to analyze the NFA expenses, the agency discovered that only 16 percent of these subsidies benefited poor farmers, he said.

“How much subsidy goes to the poor farmer? For the most part, the money does not,” he said, because most of the palay grown by farmers have already been paid for by traders who advance the tillers enough capital upfront to enable them to proceed with the year’s planting.

By harvest time, the NFA ends up buying palay directly from the traders and middlemen, he said.—Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon