Both the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the World Bank (WB) have admitted that the Philippine Rural Development Project (PRDP) has no special emphasis on disaster-hit areas in central Philippines.
Moreover, they still have to bare publicly the accomplishments of the Mindanao Rural Development Project (MRDP), which Agriculture Secretary Proceso J. Alcala hailed as a “success,” even as a previous WB review noted the sluggish absorption of funds and the low number of proposed projects in many of the more than 100 municipalities targeted by the DA and WB.
At a news briefing on Tuesday at the Fernando Lopez Hall of the Bureau of Soils and Water Management at the DA main office in Quezon City, Carolina F. Geron, WB lead rural development specialist, said it is the DA which has to pursue the projects for three regions in the Visayas hit by Supertyphoon Yolanda in 2013.
The typhoon cost agriculture more than P3 billion in damage, destroyed 16 million coconut trees, killed 7,350 people with hundreds, even thousands, still missing, and ruined up to 90 percent of Tacloban City and the Samar provinces.
However, Alcala said “PRDP will be implemented with the Asean Economic Community [AEC] in mind. With PRDP, we shall be competitive.” Geron assured journalists that the final report on the MRDP will be released soon.
MRDP is important in planning and implementing PRDP, considering that the DA officials had to fan out to hundreds of towns to convince local officials to make use of the funds borrowed from the WB.
Curiously, a most significant segment of the PRDP, the Enterprise Component (I-REAP), only has a portfolio of 31 subprojects worth P361.84 million and it covers market assistance, capability-building, technology development and production and postharvest support.
In the case of Mindanao, as noted by economist Dr. Gilbert Llanto in his paper “Strengthening Markets of High Value Fruits and Vegetables in Mindanao: The Case of Transport and Shipping Service Improvement” delivered during the second international conference on Agriculture and Rural Development 2014 at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel on November 12 and 13, farmers have to contend with high freight costs to bring their produce to markets in the Visayas and Luzon.
Llanto also wrote a monograph on the same issue for the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Research and Graduate Study in Agriculture (Searca) and argued that even with better roads, good telecommunications facilities and adequate power supply, the cost of transporting vegetables and fruits within Mindanao was still a high P1,000 per metric ton (MT.)
Alcala and Geron are practically arguing that pumping in more money for farmers and fishermen would ipso facto lead to higher incomes, with PRDP executive director saying that in the case of MRDP, the target was to raise the incomes of farmers and fishermen by 20 percent.
The goal is crucial since 49 percent of millions of fishermen live below the poverty line, like 44 percent of scores of millions of farmers, including the more than 1.2 million in Southern Luzon who do not own land and those who have reverted back being tenants in land covered by the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP.)
Alcala and Geron said that there is a total of P11.382 billion earmarked for production, marketing and logistics support for farmers and fishermen in the countryside and the projects to be covered have been proposed by local government units (LGUs).
However, the question is just how significant these projects would be in the light of the AEC, which reduces tariffs to a range of zero percent to 5 percent, thus militating against millions of Filipino farmers who have to contend with imported rice from Vietnam and Thailand.
Similarly, the farmers and fishermen being supported by the PRDP will be at the losing end as foreign agricultural commodities flood the market.
The government and the WB signed PRDP’s P27.5-billion loan-and-grant agreement on September 8, 2014, which was declared effective and ready for loan drawdown in early December 2014, even as the supposed beneficiaries are still on the planning stage.
For the project’s official first year from July 2014 to June 2015, planning covered 66 provinces out of the total 80 as of December 2014.
Of this number, 29 had their provincial commodity investment plans (PCIPs) approved by their respective Provincial Development Council (PDC).
A total of 195 subprojects have already been proposed by LGUs under the Infrastructure Development Component (I-BUILD) worth P11.02 billion, part of which is the construction and rehabilitation of 1,121 kilometers of farm-to-market roads (FMRs) costing P9.7 billion.
“We do not need to start new projects and enterprises if there are those we can enhance, upscale or mainstream. All our trading posts, grains processing centers, fish ports and other facilities are I-REAP projects in waiting. Some of these only need to be appropriately situated in the commodity value chain or only need to be jumpstarted through one of our financing programs,” Alcala said.
Based on PRDP’s progress report, 58 provincial LGUs have already entered into a partnership with the DA for the project by signing memoranda of agreement.
Since its inception two years ago, the project now has value-chain analyses for 25 PRDP priority commodities all over the country, including coffee, rubber, mango and seaweeds.