Capitalist

During the entire time he concurrently held the agriculture portfolio, President Marcos has not made a dent on the policy architecture that brought us only failure. Finally, he has handed over control of the vital Department of Agriculture (DA) to someone else.

Little is known about Francis Tiu Laurel’s thinking about the state of our agriculture and fisheries. He has yet to make a comprehensive statement of his plans.

Much of the media reporting about the new Secretary of Agriculture focused on his being a close friend of the President, a major campaign contributor and, by the way, a successful businessman. None of those attributes automatically translates into redemption for the nation’s food supply.

Our agriculture and fisheries are in dire straits. We are not producing enough to feed our people. Our costs are way too high and the inaccessibility of food prices is a major source of poverty.

Climate change and overfishing threatens our aquaculture. There will not be enough bounty from the seas that surround us to supply what we need. Our small fishermen are catching less and less and our fishing fleets are operating further and further away from the archipelago.

There should be reason to be hopeful, however, that new thinking might finally infiltrate our agriculture policy architecture. Laurel, after all, is not cut from the same bureaucratic cloth as his predecessors.

For too long, the DA has functioned largely as arbiter of state subsidies to subsistence farmers and fishermen. The agency has not been the font of new ideas about how we can produce our food better and cheaper. It was never the force for change and reinvention that it urgently needs to be.

Laurel is a capitalist. That should be a good thing. He understands the value of investing and technological infusion to rapidly improving our food production.

Lately, the only innovations of note in our agriculture were introduced by tycoons who had to fight bureaucrats to bring improvements to the way we do things. Among these are: the large pig farms of the Lucio Tan group, the mega chicken farms recently embarked on by San Miguel Corporation and the vertical farms as well as dairy production ventured into