Who’s lying about Kidapawan–the peasants or Coloma?

In the article titled “Raps readied vs gov, PNP” (Front Page, 4/4/16), Presidential Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr. is quoted to have said the following: “That’s why it would be too simplistic to just say that what the farmers were asking for was not granted. That’s a lie because the program implemented and still being implemented by the government [is] comprehensive,” he said.

I was in Barangay Molmol, a mountain barangay of Jose Abad Santos, a town of Davao Occidental, from March 21 to 28, 2016. We observed Holy Week with the tribes (80 percent Manobo, 10 percent B’laan, and 10 percent Bisaya). What I saw with my own two eyes were the following:

1. The soil was cracked dry. Where was the government’s irrigation program?

2. The vegetable gardens were dead; even the resilient malunggay did not have leaves for our sinigang. So, we had only dried fish for breakfast, lunch and supper; with no vegetables! Where were the heat resistant crops?

3. The lumad pound rice from last year’s harvest; there should have been new rice in the first quarter of 2016. Where were the heat-resistant rice seeds?

4. The chickens were dead, from what the Cebuanos call “gi-atay” — a disease caused by too much heat, among other causes.

With the above facts on the ground, either Coloma was lying, not the farmers; or he, in the air-conditioned operations rooms of Malacañang, was grossly misinformed about what is happening on the ground.

—EMY MANINGO, Aboitiz Street, Cebu City