It was a decent SONA. It covered most of the bases. It was refreshingly polite. After six years of foul language, Junior was a relief.
But we have this useless expectation for a President to present himself as a visionary when he delivers his SONA. To be perfectly honest, very few of SONA plans see the light of day.
Since Junior hardly said anything substantive during his campaign, his first SONA provided us an idea of what he is thinking. There was a smorgasbord of plans and promises. Good. But…
Given the crisis we are in right now, we should want our President to zero in on major problems. I think we have two that cannot be ignored anymore: food and education.
Food security is no doubt an important priority of Junior. His decision to head the agriculture department himself shows how concerned he is about the problem.
But Junior has no hands-on exposure to agriculture. He will depend on technocrats and we have too many of them with too much book knowledge they tend to get drowned in the solutions. So, nothing much happens.
Our basic problem is that our farms do not have the kind of scale that can lift our farmers out of poverty. We have an agrarian reform law that makes the problem even more acute. That’s a good place to start.
Maybe Junior should order the Agriculture and Agrarian Reform departments to work together to rescue farmers from poverty by improving their productivity. Then food security is better assured.
That’s assuming they understand problems from the ground. Dodo Galindo, a weekend farmer who discovered the joys of farming after retirement, wrote me about his experience:
“Boo, I am glad you finally wrote about the problems of small-scale farming in our country. After my retirement 25 years ago, I got myself involved in operating a three hectare farm in Angat, Bulacan where I learned about growing rice and vegetables and the many problems encountered by small scale farmers.
“Rice farming — availability of first class seeds and hybrid seeds. I had to go to Philrice in UPLB or in CLSU to buy the seeds. With the increasing cost of fertilizer and fuels, I finally discontinued planting rice 15 years ago.
“Good seeds, mechanization, and irrigation are the keys to higher productivity. I used to harvest 90 to 100 cavans per hectare using non-hybrid seeds, 140 cavans per hectare for hybrid seeds.
“Irrigation. Most of the farms in my area are not benefiting from free irrigation supposedly provided by the government. This is a major component of the cost of production in addition to fertilizers.
“Technical services. Maybe, it is about time to get senior and graduate students in agriculture present in the farms to provide updated knowledge in agricultural planting practices. I rarely encounter DA personnel visiting farms in my area.
“Logistics. The farmers are at the mercy of middlemen when selling their products. Prices of goods at the farm are only 50 perent of the retail prices at the final wet markets.
“Quality. DA personnel should go out in the field to teach farmers the importance of quality of harvested fruits and vegetables, especially in the area of cleanliness and packaging.”
That in a nutshell is where we are. It does not present the whole picture, but a good idea of what must be addressed. Then there are the LGUs.
For one thing, agricultural extension workers are now all under the LGUs as early as 20 years ago because of the Local Government Code of 1991. The barangay, municipal, city, and provincial extension workers are reporting directly to their respective LGU officials, not the DA.
As one former DA official lamented, “it baffles me why the public keeps on blaming central DA when there are unsold agri harvests when an LGU can and should provide the trucks to bring products to the markets since this is their mandate, further strengthened by the recent Mandanas-Garcia ruling.”
As for education, the problem is a lot more fundamental than introducing ROTC in senior high school. Our children are testing at the bottom of a list of countries on proficiency in math, science, and reading.
That all starts by being food/nutrition starved even while in their mother’s womb. By age five, their malnourished brains are no longer able to learn as easily.
Here is another perspective from journalist Tony Lopez:
“Our kids lack nourishment in body and mind. In 2018, 30.3 percent of kids had low height for their age (stunted), 5.6 percent had low weight for their height, and 58 million Filipinos lacked enough food during the pandemic. During the pandemic, 33 percent of Filipinos lacked money to buy food.
“about 26.1 million Filipinos are poor or near-poor. about 42.4 percent of poor children are stunted. Undernutrition is more prevalent in the rural areas than in urban areas. Ironically, our food producers — our farmers — are the poorest and most food insecure Filipinos.
“Phinma’s Dr. Chito Salazar cites a 2017 study in which 97 percent of school children were found to be below proficient in math, science, and English.
“Per World Bank and Unicef data, during the two years of the pandemic, the ratio of 10-year-olds (fourth graders) who could not read a simple text rose from 70 percent to 90 percent.
“Stunted kids who become adults learn 20 percent less than their non-stunted counterparts.
“Our young are growing up knowing nothing. This makes them very good voters. They are gullible.”
The SONA didn’t give us a clear idea of how Junior and Sara plan to fix the problem. Raising new generations of citizens who struggle to read, write, and count isn’t going to make us competitive in the digital economy.
The problem isn’t K-12. We don’t have enough trained teachers supported by good teaching materials.
This job is too big for DepEd alone. Ayala’s Centex project could be a good starting point for public-private cooperation. Centex has a promotion rate of 100 percent; Dropout rate of zero.
Other conglomerates should help by sponsoring more Centex schools nationwide. At the very least, Centex can save the truly talented, but poor students.
