President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s first year as Agriculture secretary has been mired in controversies of illegal sugar imports, shortages and rising prices of agricultural products.
Despite these, the president has been persistent in helming the Agriculture department, explaining that he is in a better position to quickly carry out reforms since people in the sector “cannot say no” to the chief executive.
But how exactly did he fare in his goals and plans for the agriculture sector?
Since the campaign in the 2022 presidential elections, Marcos had already expressed plans to attain food security and stabilize the prices of agricultural commodities. These aspirations were echoed in his first State of the Nation Address (SONA) in July 2022 when he laid out six promises to strengthen the local agricultural industry.
Of the six promises, three were fulfilled. The Marcos administration succeeded in providing loans to the agriculture sector for farm inputs, imposing a one-year moratorium on payment of land amortization and interest and the signing into law of the new Agrarian Emancipation Act.
Another promise shows progress with the launching of the National Farm-to-Market Roads Network Plan 2023-2028 by the Bureau of Agricultural and Fisheries Engineering (BAFE) under the Department of Agriculture (DA).
While the president is on track on his promises to help farmers, Marcos fell short in achieving his goal of bringing down food prices.
Despite the establishment of Kadiwa ng Pasko to control rising prices amid the holiday season and its subsequent rebranding into “Kadiwa ng Pangulo,” Filipinos suffered from a rise in the retail prices of onion in the last week of December 2022. Although rice is sold at P25 per kilo in Kadiwa centers, the staple still ranges from P36-50 per kilo in public markets in Metro Manila as of writing.
The administration is yet to pass one of Marcos’ priority bills — the National Land Use Act. It has been stalled in Congress, with five Senate bills still pending at the committee level.
VERA Files Fact Check looked into how Marcos fared in his promises related to agriculture:
