This is the first time that such a sum is earmarked in the national budget, said Budget and Management Secretary Emilia T. Boncodin.
Such a budget, she added, will be appropriated every year onwards "until we have fulfilled the dreams of agricultural modernization". This is in line with the Arroyo administration’s having placed agricultural modernization in the anti-poverty agenda.
Boncodin’s forum was the annual National Symposium on Agriculture and Resources Research and Development (NSARRD) convened by the Los Baños-based Department of Science and Technology-Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (DOST-PCARRD) held recently at the Manila Hotel. The holding of NSARRD coincided with PCARRD’s 29th anniversary celebration.
PCARRD, headed by Executive Director Patricio S. Faylon, is DOST’s sectoral planning body that coordinates, evaluates, and monitors agriculture and resources research in the country.
In her keynote address, Boncodin stressed that the country’s present economic order has vigorously pushed the role of agriculture S&T to a mere pressing and challenging horizon.
"It has more than outgrown the concern of filling up the bowl for the country’s teeming millions, but likewise focused on the need to strengthen the country’s agricultural sinew to meet global competitions," she stressed.
The Cabinet official continued: "The ugly picture of hunger, want, and deprivations as experienced in its brutal reality by some nations, is more than enough motivation that stirs us to action. Surely, we cannot allow these social economic evils to sweep in and triumph, especially in this country that has been so generously blessed with arable lands, a congenial climate, and more important, a people of ingenuity and indomitable spirit."
Perturbingly, she said, the tremendous competition brought about by trade liberalization has made it difficult for Filipino farmers to compete with their foreign counterparts, thus the glimmering hope of the country’s aspiration for a stable economy through agri-industrialization.
To survive, Boncodin emphasized, the situation calls for more adoptable technologies that would be beneficial to the farmers. The farming sector should be geared not only with efficient but also affordable technologies.
The DBM official further stressed the need to equip private enterprises with S&T enabling tools, particularly the small-scale entrepreneurs in the countryside, they being the backbone of economic development.
Of special concerns are the agribusiness entrepreneurs who have emerged as the key movers of the economy, she added.
Summing up, Boncodin asserted that S&T efforts must, therefore, be focused on empowering farmers and entrepreneurs through beneficial researches. Toward this end, S&T must enable the flow of information that will benefit these two equally important sectors.
"After all, agricultural success like entrepreneurship, does not only depend on the existence of opportunities, competence in management, access to capital and credit, but most important on the application of technologies and processes," Boncodin concluded.