Year-end stocktaking (2)

The Department of Agriculture (DA) is one of the most vital agencies in the national bureaucracy. In its official webpage, the DA, including its attached agencies like the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources is “… pivotal in generating employment for about a third of the country’s labor force, thereby reducing poverty and inequality for three-fourths of the poor who are in the rural areas…” (Chapter 8 of The Philippine Development Plan of 2017 -2022)

As of yesterday, this vital department is still being managed as an add-on responsibility, since President Marcos Jr. has decided to be its concurrent secretary. The executive decision-maker of this vital agency of the government whose task is the reduction of poverty and inequality among three-fourths of the country’s impoverished populations in the rural areas is one who has lived in opulence and privilege all his life.

For sure, there are scores of highly qualified women and men in the department, who have appropriate educational qualifications, training, and experience in managing it, so it will achieve its main mandate. Yet, no one among them was appointed regular secretary of the department. This could explain why the department has not taken decisive moves to address runaway increases in the prices of basic commodities that hit the poor the hardest.

Living in affluence all his life, the concurrent honcho of the DA does not have a sense of urgency in addressing these pressing problems that do not affect him at all. His family members seem to share the same perspective. Remember how his son mansplained why the peso is weak? He said, with full confidence, that it is so because the “dollar is strong.”

To top the effrontery against the poor, Mr. Marcos’ administrators at the Department of Trade and Industry promoted something outrageous: that P500 was adequate to buy ingredients for the traditional “noche buena” (Christmas Eve) feast. At that time, until New Year’s Eve, last-minute shoppers at supermarkets and in wet markets around the country raised a huge outcry over the astronomical price of red onions—from P450 to P750 per kilo!

I wonder if the President, as DA secretary, is aware of the vision of the department:

“The DA envisions a food-secured and resilient Philippines with empowered and prosperous farmers and fishers. As such, it shall collectively empower them and the private sector to increase agricultural productivity and profitability, taking into account sustainable, competitive, and resilient technologies and practices.”

And what is his roadmap to ensure the health and well-being of the country’s more than 100 million population, at least during his term? As one sitting on a figurative pile of gold, this one, too, may not be among his urgent concerns. This also explains his long-delayed decision to appoint a regular secretary to another vital sector—the Department of Health.

With regard to upholding the rule of law, it seems that this administration has not done anything substantial in its first six months. Sure, it is still a short period of reckoning but, at least, he should already be crafting strong policies to ensure that the extrajudicial killings that took place in his predecessor’s term will already be a thing of the past. But in the past few months, several incidents of impunity took place. Here, in Mindanao, among the latest manifestations of impunity was the killing of three youngsters in Lambayong, Sultan Kudarat, by a policeman and the brazen killing of an indigenous woman leader in Cotabato City just a few days before Christmas. Many civil society leaders believe that the mastermind of the killing is a sitting local chief executive who had crossed with the leaders of an indigenous group in his municipality.

What do we expect in 2023 and the next years under Mr. Marcos’ presidency? More of the same problems we used to have under Rodrigo Duterte, except that the current president’s gift of gab may paint a silky-smooth image to hide the dirty linens of his administration. And many of us may be hoodwinked by it. He has truly learned from his mother: “Perception is real, truth is not.”

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