Amid soaring food prices and a looming dry spell that strongly affected fisherfolks and some 175,063 farmers in 163,694 hectares of land, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. stepped down as Agriculture secretary in November 2023.
In his 17 months at the helm of the Department of Agriculture (DA), the president insisted on staying to quickly carry out sectoral reforms. Marcos finally heeded calls for him to give up the post and appointed billionaire and fishing tycoon Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. to take his place.
With marching orders to tame the prices of agricultural commodities, Laurel pledged to modernize agriculture in the country and continue the initiatives laid down by Marcos.
In his second State of the Nation Address (SONA) last year, the president made four promises to boost local agriculture production and achieve food security for the country. All those pledges are still in progress, while the two he made in his first SONA in 2022 remain unfulfilled.
Marcos refrained from mentioning his election campaign “aspiration” to bring down rice prices to P20 per kilo in his 2023 SONA. However, the DA persisted in following the chief executive’s order to expand Kadiwa stores and bring down rice prices by launching the Bigas 29 program, aimed to sell rice at P29 per kilo.
While Kadiwa stores and outlets sell rice at cheaper prices, the retail price for regular milled rice in July remained at P49.54 per kilo.
Other agriculture-related priority bills still have to be passed by Congress.
Amendments to the Anti-Smuggling Act have passed the third and final reading in both chambers, but a bicameral conference committee still has to be convened to harmonize disagreeing provisions in the two versions of the bill.
Legislators have yet to pass amendments to the Cooperative Code and Fisheries Code, while the National Land Use bill remained stalled in the Senate. In an interview on GMA News Online in May, proponent Surigao del Norte Rep. Francisco Matugas II attributed the delay to the clashing interests among stakeholders.
Take a closer look at how the president’s promises on agriculture have fared so far:
