Farmers plant rice crops in a rice paddy in Pototan, Iloilo. Aiming to strengthen farmers’ land ownership in the country, under House Bill 9955 or Agrarian Lands Easing Act. PHOTO

MANILA – The House Committee on Ways and Means chairman is pushing for at least a 10% increase in the agricultural budget in the 2022 General Appropriations Act.

Albay Representative Joey Salceda said met with Agriculture Secretary William Dar on the possible increase to help the agriculture sector resolve price worries and drive economic recovery.

“I think we can go at least 10% additional funding. We probably need more, and I’ll try to deliver more,” He said.

Salceda cited three observations.

“First, prices will go up as the lag-effects of low interest begin to show. The only way to mitigate that is an increase in the stability and volume of food supply,” he said.

“Second… I am seeing signs of a financial bubble in Southeast Asia. You need something of a ‘sponge’ that will suck up excess financial capital. The most undercapitalized industrial sector in the Philippines is the agriculture sector,” he added.

Salceda also stressed that the country had many self-imposed restrictions on land size, efficiency, use, and ownership.

“If we can ease some of those restrictions while investing in its development, we can really boost output, far beyond the 2% per year sector growth targeted by the Department of Agriculture,” he said.

Under the 2021 national budget, agriculture was allocated P71 billion.

“The agriculture budget is still much smaller than it should be. It’s a sector with 8% output and 22% of the employed force, but just less than 2% of direct public expenditures,” Salceda said.

“The asymmetry in spending is obvious, as I discussed with Secretary Dar. And I promised him we will take a hard look at the budget and see where we can adjust upwards,” he added.

Meanwhile, Salceda also filed a bill to strengthen farmers’ land ownership in the country. Salceda’s House Bill 9955 also aims to boost investments in the agriculture sector.

The proposed Agrarian Lands Easing Act seeks to promote investments in the agriculture sector by condoning the loans of agrarian reform beneficiaries, which will “allow more productive use of agrarian reform land to sale, lease, or joint venture with farmers, and open a low-interest loan facility to help farmers repurchase mortgaged agrarian reform land.”

Salceda noted that if this would be enacted, it would be the first overhaul of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law in more than three decades.

“This bill will remove many of the hindrances to growth in the agriculture sector. Our farm sector is inefficient not because farmers are lazy. The system has several flaws that stunt the agriculture sector. This bill will lift many of them,” the lawmaker said in a statement.

“We have not made any major changes to the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law. It has been 33 years. Many of its provisions have failed both its beneficiaries and the whole agricultural sector. It did not produce more food for our people, and it failed to lift the farm sector out of poverty. Let’s reform agrarian reform,” he added.

Salceda cited a 2019 study by economists Tasso Adamopoulos and Diego Restuccia, saying that the government’s agrarian reform program has resulted in land fragmentation, reducing average farm size by 34 percent; agricultural productivity by 17 percent; and the share of landless individuals by 20 percent.

The present restriction on farmlands under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law “has effectively discouraged efficient rural land market operations, eroded the value and collateral value of awarded lands, reduced the farmers’ incentive to invest in land improvements, and limited the choice of more efficient contractual arrangements.”

The bill also increases the landholding limit to 24 hectares, helps farmer-beneficiaries upgrade titles to electronic titles for free, and allows banks to hold mortgage rights on agrarian reform land.