Agriculture Secretary Francis Tiu Laurel announced Tuesday, January 16, that he had no available cash aid for vegetable farmers from the Cordilleras who have been crying over the excruciatingly low prices of their products.
His reason: no budgetary outlay for this.
To recall, Laurel said in a radio interview that he is not giving any financial assistance to the vegetable farmers of the Cordilleras, who are crying about the dumping rates of their produce being offered by traders.
This contradicts what DA-CAR Regional Technical Director for Operations Danilo Daguio said in another interview by a daily newspaper Sunday, January 14, that they are preparing to assist farmers by linking them to the market sand transporting their crops through the KADIWA program of the Department of Agriculture (DA).
Daguio assured the vegetable farmers that “if you need help selling products, we have a ‘Kadiwa on Wheels’ program that’s continuous.”
“The best thing to do is for farmers to approach their municipal and provincial agriculturists, and they will know what to do,” he added.
Laurel, on the other hand, said he believes that a better assistance is providing them seeds, fertilizers and others.
“As much as possible we’re trying to find ways na matulungan sila of course. I think that’s the job of the government. As of the moment, our team at the DA is trying to figure out what we can give them. As far as cash ayuda is concerned, I’m actually not a believer in that. I’d rather give farm implements like seeds, fertilizers, something else, or ano. Pero definitely we will try our best na makatulong tayo kasi ‘yan ang mandato natin,” Laurel stressed.
Benguet farmers have been giving away their cabbages because of oversupply while onion and cauliflower farmers of Nueva Ecija have been suffering from pest and diseases.
By clear contrast, when the DA imposed price ceilings on rice – which prompted retailers to either forego selling the staple or offer only the premium rice – the government was quick to provide P15,000 per retailer financial aid so they can continue offering rice at the ceilings of P40 for regular milled and P45 for well-milled.
The assistance easily cost billions for just the weeklong financial assistance; however, the price ceilings were later removed as they were not effective in lowering the price of rice.
Laurel promised that he would be setting up cold storage facilities in the Food Terminal Inc. (FTI) compound in Taguig City to ensure that agricultural products would be properly stored and processed to prevent the boom-and-bust cycles in agricultural trade.
In early January, videos of cabbage dumping on roadsides and cliffs and other crops being sold at giveaway rates or for free circulated online.
Yet in an earlier interview, DA spokesperson Assistant Secretary Arnel de Mesa denied such an oversupply of main vegetables and attributed the price fluctuation and disposal of crops to limited trucking and a few vegetable buyers in the first three days of the year. (This sounded like the reprimand last year of former Senior DA Undersecretary Domingo Panganiban to onion growers for not studying the market dynamics.)
Meanwhile farmers’ group Sinag has linked the abundance of vegetables this month to last December’s good harvest.
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