By Ali G. Macabalang
KIDAPAWAN CITY – The Department of Agriculture (DA) will start implementing next year a “major policy shift” in its service to Filipino farmers and fisher folks, adopting an easy access soft-loan system in lieu of graft-prone subsidies observed for years.
Agriculture Secretary Manny F. Piñol announced yesterday in his Facebook page that President Duterte approved his recommendation for DA to abandon its seeds, fertilizer and farm machinery and equipment subsidies program that “has been marked with issues of corruption and slow implementation over the years.”
“The most prominent of these subsidy anomalies was the Fertilizer scam where under the pretext of buying fertilizers for farmers billions of pesos were released to different Congressional Districts and Local Government Units, including those in Metro Manila,” Piñol said..
Piñol said the DA recommendation approved by the President was based on his observations and validations in his two-year stint as agriculture secretary about susceptibility of subsidies to corruption and red tape-laden processes usually yielding material assistance “when the planting season is over and the germination percentage has gone down.”
