In a prostrate sector, vileness does not rest

The time of the virus is, in the ideal world, the time to end the assault on the country’s small farmers. Small farmers in the country are the country’s wretched: invisible to government, prey to repressive laws like the Rice Tariffication Law, avoided like a plague by the banking mainstream — and voiceless and cowed. The average age of the Filipino farmer is 57 years as the young generally shy away from the heartbreaks those small-scale farming deals on the young. I come from a long, uninterrupted line of small farmers. The current reality is this: I may be the last of the hardscrabble Ronquillo males foolish enough to sustain the small-farming tradition.

The Department of Agriculture (DA) is so engrossed with propaganda and image building that it totally jettisoned its legal and moral mandate to help the small farmers.

Put simply, this is our status: the small Filipino farmer is prostrate, hopeless and screwed by official policies. But then we have this hope that the virus season may give pause to the sustained assault on the country’s small farmers. Parang awa nyo na. Have pity. We, small farmers, have suffered enough.

Then, our wretched world came tumbling, crashing down a little more as we woke up to the harsh reality of our times. The virus season woke up to the harsh reality of our times. The virus season has only intensified the vileness of the crooks that traditionally screw the small farmers.  A resolution filed by members of the Makabayan bloc in the House of Representatives tells a heart-rending story. And the tragic thing is that the DA, the agency with the legal and moral mandate to help the small farmers, allegedly is behind a massive fertilizer overprice. Here is the gist of House Resolution 992.

Fertilizer, the main inorganic input to shore up rice production (organic fertilizer won’t do for massive paddy programs), was procured by the DA under its Rice Resiliency Program.
Nothing wrong about this, but then again we have yet to come to the bidding and official procurement part.

A bidding process ensued. And that was the allegedly rigged part, according to the Makabayan bloc.

A total 1.8 billion bags of urea fertilizer (we rice farmers call this 46 percent, as opposed to  “complete” or 14-14-14) was initially put up for public bidding. The total acquisition cost was P1.8 billion, or P1,000 per bag.

When the Makabayan bloc asked their farmer-members to check the prices of fertilizer in their areas — and the starting point had to be the small farmers in the country’s rice granary  (Central Luzon) — this was what the small farmers reported.   The average price  of urea in  Nueva  Ecija , the prolific rice producer,  has been P840 per bag. When you talk of the prices of basic farm inputs, you have to reckon with the prices in Nueva Ecija. It is, historically, the biggest rice producer in the country and you have farmers there so prodigious that they produce an average of 200 bags of palay per hectare using routine and time-tested  rice farming methods.

In Tarlac, another part of the rice granary, the average price was P830 per bag. It was P810 per bag in Pangasinan, according to the Makabayan bloc. Pangasinan, under the old map, used to be part of Central Luzon, a part of the country’s rice granary.

The Makabayan bloc, after looking at the average prices of urea dealers, made a conservative estimate. The initial DA urea purchase of 1.8 million bags was overpriced  by at least P271.66 million.

Moreover, the bid winner, according to the Makabayan bloc, had two major failures.

Allegedly, it does not have a ready 1.8 billion bags of urea to supply what it won. Second, according to the bloc, the bid winner failed to show a bill of lading that such a big fertilizer shipment was forthcoming. The alleged overpriced, the alleged  grand failure of the winning bidder are the main points raised in the  call of the Makabayan bloc for a congressional investigation of  the issue.

The two committees with the mandate to look deeper into the explosive allegations,  agriculture and food and  good government and public accountability, now have  the resolution. Small farmers hope that the two committees will do their job and conduct an impartial, in-depth inquiry into the allegations of the Makabayan bloc.

The two committees, according to the bloc,  should also ask the DA to  hold in abeyance further fertilizer purchases under the program. The lame contention of the DA, that the P1,000 per bag price was based on the monitoring of the fertilizer and pesticide authorities and that other costs had been inputted in the bid  award, does not wash.

Fair is fair. An allegation of an overprice, for a rice production program in particular, is tragic as tragic can be. This is a program where every peso  counts, there is no room for malice and vileness.  Boosting rice inventory is a very critical thing in the time of the virus.

Remember that we had a brief scare in  March, when Vietnam temporarily decided to restrict rice  exports. Last year, we imported 2.1 million metric tons from Vietnam, our main rice supplier.

What if local rice inventory is depleted and Vietnam says it has suspended all rice exports?  What if that same decision is adopted by Laos and Cambodia?

The other tragic story involves, again, rice importation. A farming group has alleged that rice imports from January to April this year have been grossly undervalued to reduce the tariff payments. Under the rice tariff law, the rice tariff collections will go to a small-farmers amelioration fund. With the rice imports undervalued, with the valuation manipulated at the ports, very little in amelioration fund would go to the small rice farmers savaged by the Rice Tariffication Law.

Just like kicking the dying. I will deal with this issue in a future column.