Given the recent railroading of the P6.32 trillion General Appropriations Act (GAA) as the legislature conspired with the executive branch to fashion a virtual 2025 midterm elections pork-fattened war chest, it becomes incumbent upon us to review promises made by President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., especially as he now attempted to convince the public that he would study and scrutinize the 2025 budget crafted by the bicameral committee tasked to reconcile the House and Senate versions. 

Marcos has raised our expectations before. The resulting institutional pork barrel budget would not be the first promise dashed by deceit. That infamy belongs to the ludicrous promise of a P20/kilo price of rice.

Now, Marcos wants to flood Kadiwa stores and retail markets with rice, hoping prices would move towards the neighborhood of P35/kilo or thereabouts. The objective may be to show some positivity to validate election promises, timely amid the 2025 campaign period. Never mind that a substantial percentage of the incremental supply might be from Vietnamese imports which alone crowds out domestic rice farmers thus requiring a taxpayer-funded support price.

At every junction where changes are possible, from life-altering shifts in political ideology such as the death of dynasties in China in 1912 and the eventual transitioning that culminated in the birth and eventual domination of a godless hegemonic autocracy from 1921 onwards, to the overwhelming mandate won by the Conservatives over the long-ruling Liberals in American politics, there are the requisite reviews of immediate precedents. Typically, there is the invariable benchmarking against promises from which expectations are either sustained when fulfilled or frustrated when failed.

Wasted opportunities

As we enter the second half of the Marcos incumbency won from those unexplained hours as darkness fell on the evening of May 9, 2022, three extraordinarily long years now and barely into the first few weeks of 2025, allow us to recall wasted opportunities to fulfill what was perhaps a defining political campaign promise. 

Little has changed in the lives of Marcos’s largest laboring constituency, our farming communities, albeit a cabal of influential rice importers are living a dream, enriched, and favored by statutory and institutional supports that are the hallmarks of the trademark Marcos legacy of governance.

It is in the Marcos DNA. During the darkest years of the dictatorship, agriculture was surrendered to a chosen few. Who can forget the sugar and coconut industries under Ferdinand E. Marcos? Risen and reincarnated, conceptually the same structures dominate our most critical agricultural crop.

In 2020, when Marcos promised that the price of rice would fall to P20/kilo, among the constituencies directly impacted were 2.4 million rice farmers. Of the 10.66 million employed in agriculture then, as many as a quarter were rice farmers. 

To estimate those directly affected, multiply the number of rice farmers by five, the average family size. While the population of rice farmers has changed since 2020 given how the economy has either developed or regressed, a cumulative population of at least twelve million against the total population of 112.2 million in 2020 means that his promise affects as much as 10.69% of all Filipinos.

Do the math, but this time factor-in a political dimension. Marcos was declared president based on 31.63 million votes. If anyone believes that then those numbers determined the fate of at least 2.4 million directly affected by the P20/kilo rice price promise. 

Because Marcos took over an economy plagued by serial recessions and a pandemic, it was natural that there would be a rebound (real or dead-cat-bounce) whether he promised one or not. 

While the statistics office claims poverty incidence improved by about 3% in the immediate period after the pandemic years, note that the economy had hit historic rock bottom immediately prior to 2022. The new base from which Marcos was to build was one where two-thirds of households were experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity. With rice as a primary staple, addressing the rice concerns alone would have impacted greatly on a majority of the public, not to mention the poverty statistics that had worsened from the pandemic’s rampage.

Now analyze the consumer price index (CPI) as Marcos grabbed the helm and personally steered agricultural development as concomitant Department of Agriculture (DA) secretary. Under Duterte’s final year, inflation was 2.5%. After a year of Marcos, this nearly doubled to 4.5% and 4.9%. By August 2021, food inflation alone was 6.9%.

Food insecurity

Impacting on the most vulnerable, today food inflation accounts for over 82% of overall inflation for the lower 30% of income households. 

On a grander, more structural scale, note the altered demographics of Marcos’s mismanagement. Because food security under Marcos is dependent on importations as he desperately tries to make good on the P20/kilo rice price promise, domestic rice farming characterized by family-based communities is now being decimated as next generation farm workers abandon and flee to other forms of livelihood. Those who remain are marching on the streets and joining others in protest. 

Not only are the poorest deprived of their traditional income sources and now paying higher just to avoid going hungry, but our domestic food security is now propped up by external economies.

To understand, allow us a Socratic approach. Would the resulting fall in poverty incidence by 3%, when specifically focused on agricultural producers and farming folk, be adequate to counter the rise in food prices they must contend with as the non-farming urban communities recover? 

It is worth noting from a governance perspective that both farming and non-farming communities require a full return to employment as the pandemic years reduced total employment by at least 25%. Worse, for those who still had jobs by Marcos’s inaugural, about 75% suffered severely reduced incomes accounting for the huge gap between unemployment and underemployment.

Had Marcos done the math, one of his priorities would have been to attempt food security by strengthening the domestic farming sector from the bottom up, specifically focusing on rice as the principal food staple, rice as the most impactful in the CPI and, of course, on a granular scale, rice farmer welfare as critical to domestic food security.

That requires a competent agriculture secretary capable of expansive multidimensional analysis involving different sectors linked in the rice value chain. The smaller populations in that chain would be the input providers like fertilizer and pesticide sellers, then the rice traders and millers. The most scarce should ideally be the importers who augment supply when needed.

Unfortunately, when we superimpose a power pyramid over the rice value chain, we quickly realize that the greater farming folk have the least influence while slightly farther up the chain more and more family-owned farmer-millers are dying out.

Series of unfortunate bungling

The increasing blight is the result of a series of unfortunate bungling. Remember when Marcos attempted to rewrite the law of supply and demand, employed tariffication to open the gates to imports and imposed purchasing from external economies as a default policy? He thereafter relinquished control of the DA when he claimed he achieved structural changes, and then, relative to cost-squeezes and hurdles faced by local rice farmers, as final nail on their collective coffin, he smoothed out the ritual wrinkles along the path of traders and importers and then slashed importation tariffs by as much as 43%.

Three years after raising our expectations, how then should we view the P20/kilo political campaign promise given that, if at all it is achieved, it will be artificially priced, subsidized and paid with a support price premium from taxpayers, or limited to lower quality varieties? All these likely achieved at the expense of the Filipino rice farmer through a pathetic dependence on external economies, a cabal of chosen and favored importers and the Marcos rice importation default.

Like the sham 2025 elections-tailored GAA that institutionalizes an aberrant budgetary device to prop up both the greed and ambitions of politicians, likewise the P20/kilo promise may have been nothing but an attempt to delude the public that prices would go down and relieve us of a traditional systemic curse. It was definitely not about agricultural productivity. In this year of the midterm elections, under both political props, economic development, public welfare, and staple self-sufficiency in the case of rice, are all trumped by raw and brazen avarice and an insatiable lust for power. – Rappler.com

Dean de la Paz is a former investment banker and managing director of a New Jersey-based power company operating in the Philippines. He is the chairman of the board of a renewable energy company and is a retired Business Policy, Finance, and Mathematics professor. He collects Godzilla figures and antique tin robots.