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Wearing his agriculture secretary hat on, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. paid special attention to the agriculture sector in his first State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Monday, July 25. Plans for the sector took up a tenth of the entire SONA. But unlike his economic policies, the president did not present hard targets, just promises and plans to address the short- and long-term problems hounding the industry.
First, Marcos pledged financial and equipment aid for farmers and fishermen to address their immediate needs. While he did not share specifics on how much of the country's budget would be allotted for the program, the president said it would be a key policy of his administration. For context, the Department of Agriculture (DA) has already issued several aid packages for agricultural workers before and after the pandemic. The COA found that the DA failed to spend some of its allotted funds in 2021.
To start the ball rolling on this assistance, the president said he will pass an Executive Order that will impose a one-year moratorium on the payment of land amortization and interest payments of farmers.
The president also sought Congress to pass a law that will “emancipate the agrarian reform beneficiaries from agrarian reform debt burden.” He also signaled the implementation of Executive Order No. 75, Series of 2019, which requires government agencies to distribute unused agricultural lands of the government to landless veterans, retirees and their spouses and orphans, and agriculture graduates, as mandated by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.
Such plans are reminiscent of one of the first policies that Marcos Sr. passed during Martial Law. In October 1972, a month after the country was placed under Martial rule, the dictator signed Presidential Decree No. 27, which seeks the “emancipation of tenants from the bondage of the soil.” This was supposed to help farmers own the land they till. But a New York Times article published in 1975 reported the policy left a lot to be desired, as its implementation became fragmented. After the publication of the Decree, Marcos Sr. announced various amendments, saying the reform should be “gradual”and “piecemeal.” The president gave way for exemptions, resulting in some landowners to “parcel out their holdings illegally to relatives,” the New York Times found.
For President Marcos Jr., the move to distribute land could bring in fresh blood into the agriculture sector, which had been facing a lack of new, young workers. Former Agriculture Sec. William Dar had previously reported that the country is set to face a “critical” shortage of farmers in the next decade.
The industry had been consistently unattractive to young Filipinos as wages remain some of the lowest in the country.
According to the University of Asia and the Pacific Center for Food and Agri Business, alleviating poverty incidence in the agricultural sector should be a priority of the Marcos administration. Based on the latest data from the Philippine Statistics Authority, farm workers get an average of P331.1 for a day of work, which is below the average minimum wage range of P374 to P408 across all regions.
“Poverty remains to be mainly an agricultural phenomenon in the country with farmers and fisherfolks among the poorest of the poor. The low farmers' income needs to be addressed and increased beyond the poverty threshold,” the Center told the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism in an email interview before the SONA.
Low productivity of farmers due to lack of access to equipment, credit, and diversified crops is what affects their income, according to the Center.
Photo by Karol Ilagan