Farmer subsidies not for time deposit – Imee

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Agriculture (DA) should speed up the release of almost P9 billion in government subsidies for rice farmers, who are now preparing for the wet planting season starting this month until October, Sen. Imee Marcos said yesterday.

Rice farmers reaching out to Marcos’ office have complained that the P5,000 worth of cash aid allotted for 1.6 million farmers was slow in coming, months after the Department of Budget and Management first announced its availability.

“Don’t put farmers’ funds in time deposit since they’re not meant to earn interest. Speed up the release, right now,” Marcos said in Filipino.

The Land Bank of the Philippines said the delay was mainly due to the DA’s problem with its ID system.

But Marcos, who chairs the Senate committee on cooperatives, said that if the DA lacks the capacity to update its Registry System for Basic Sectors in Agriculture (RSBSA), then it should call on municipal agriculturists who ought to have a list of farmers’ cooperatives in their areas of responsibility.

She added that the RSBSA list of individual farmers, who were given access to fertilizer and seed subsidies, should not exclude but continue, instead, to support those whose livelihood has grown into processing crops for value-added products.

About P18.9 billion in rice tariffs were collected by the government last year, thus allowing the allotment of close to P9 billion in additional farmer subsidies. This is aside from the P10 billion mandated under the Rice Tariffication Law.

Marcos warned of low farm yields and even food shortages if farmers are unable to use their subsidies to buy fertilizers and other farm inputs.

“The DA is creating bigger problems for itself if it delays the release of farmer subsidies. Farm yields for the country’s staple crops cannot be maintained, much less increased, if farmers can’t afford fertilizers and quit their livelihood,” she pointed out.

She said a farmer tilling one hectare of land to rice can save 25 percent to 33 percent on fertilizer costs with the P5,000 subsidy.

Farmers use about six to eight bags of fertilizer per hectare and will be spending P15,000 to P20,000 at today’s prices of urea fertilizer.

The tight global supply of fertilizer has sent local farmers reeling from prices that have tripled since 2020, from about P800 per 50-kilogram bag of urea to P2,300 to P2,500 this year.