At the same time, DBM Secretary Rolando Andaya Jr. officially issued the "budget call" for 2007, pegging the budget ceiling at P1.136 trillion, which is P72.3 billion or 6.8 percent higher than the earlier 2006 budget proposal.
Andaya said a lynchpin of the government’s hunger mitigation program would be the expansion of irrigated farmlands to close the supply gap, reduce imports and achieve self-sufficiency in rice.
"It is wrong to say that our hunger program consists primarily of so-called dole-outs. We are also addressing it from the supply side," he said.
During yesterday’s Cabinet meeting, President Arroyo approved the recommendations of the National Nutrition Council (NNC) on how to address hunger in the Philippines.
This includes providing jobs for the people in the countryside through public works and irrigation projects.
Andaya and NNC chairman Health Secretary Francisco Duque said boosting agricultural production would be complemented with welfare-type intervention programs, such as food-for-work and rice-for-school attendance schemes, because these are immediate ways to help those experiencing hunger.
Emergency employment options, such as street sweeping, road maintenance and construction work, would also be made available to residents of poor barangays.
"Food-for-school, food-for-work programs are schemes by which we solve hunger and at the same time meet literacy, employment and agricultural productivity objectives," Andaya said.
As to the expansion of irrigated rice lands, Andaya said the government released the P2.73 billion as part of the government’s pump-priming program.
"We are frontloading the (P2.73 billion) release so the Department of Agriculture (DA) can immediately repair critical national and communal irrigation systems," he said.
Acting on the DA’s recommendation, the government plans to bring water to 370,000 hectares of land between now and 2008, a move that will increase annual palay (rice) production from 15 million metric tons this year to 16.3 million metric tons in three years.
For this year, the government’s target is to reinstate the productivity of some 73,570 hectares of presently underused agricultural land, a program that is expected to create 199,000 jobs.
To date, Andaya said more than 21,000 hectares have been irrigated out of the total target for the entire year.