Press Release
October 16, 2009

LOREN URGES THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AND OTHER AFMA DEPARTMENTS TO BEAT HUNGER THIS SEASON OF CALAMITIES

        Senator Loren Legarda, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Senate Oversight Committee on Climate Change (SOCC) and Congressional Oversight Committee on Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization (COCAFM) asked the Department of Agriculture, lead agency in the implementation of the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act of 1997 (AFMA), to prepare a Calamity Plan that will beat national hunger in the short-term and lead to a food secure, poverty alleviating and sustainable agriculture and fisheries program in the long term .

        The lady senator said that everything that we need to do to achieve these objectives are all in AFMA but obviously the government is caught flat-footed by Ondoy and Pepeng. "The implementation of the Climate Change provision in AFMA in relation to the identification of the Strategic Agriculture and Fisheries Development Zones (SAFDZs) is not even assessed in the mandated AFMA implementation review in 2004 or five years after the passage of law. ," Loren said.

        "But we do not have the luxury of time to be finger pointing now. Let us do that later for the purpose of guiding us what to do for the long term when we have attended to the immediate needs of our farmers and fisherfolk. I am now laying down immediate proposals to beat the hunger and helplessness of our people. I enumerate the short-term solutions as follows:

1. I ask the Cooperative Development Development Authority (CDA) in cooperation with the municipal and provincial agriculture offices to convene the federation of municipal agriculture and fishery cooperatives in the provincial level and help them prepare a two-page proposal on the immediate needs of the farmers and fisherfolk , especially those who have not accessed government loan and grant facility yet. I ask the Department of Agriculture to use 70 percent of the additional Calamity Fund for agriculture and fishery from the Unprogrammed Fund approved by Congress to fund the proposals of agriculture, fishery and forestry cooperatives. It is good to use the cooperatives because the members can pool the limited resources and the accountability. The CDA should include even the delinquent poor cooperatives that are now in the process of re-registering their cooperatives. Most of them have problems because their members are poor and do not have funds to pay for the preparation of their annual report. If there are farmers and fisherfolk who will not be served because of favoritism of local officials, I ask them to report their non-inclusion to the Department of Agriculture Provincial Training Institute (ATI) because this office knows what is happening in the Municipal Agriculture Office (MAO) and Provincial Agriculture Office (PAO). Attending to the needs of the cooperatives is a part of the extension function of local extension workers.

2. I ask the Municipal Agriculture Offices to waste no time in including impoverished farmers and fisherfolk who are not yet members of existing cooperatives to join so that they could avail of the use of production and post-production machineries and dryers and the inputs as seeds, fertilizers and pesticides.

3. I ask the Department of Agriculture to use the additional calamity donations for the repair of our farms and fishfarms to provide free dryers, threshers and mobile millers and subsidized inputs as seeds, fertilizers and pesticides to cooperatives. Since a great part of the calamity fund and the donations are for food, let us use these funds to produce food. That way, our farmers and fisherfolk will not only have food for one meal or two but food and jobs as well to last them throughout the crisis and beyond.

4. I ask the Department of Agriculture to compute 70% of the remaining funds for the year in the Agricultural Competitive Enhancement Fund (ACEF) as grants to poor associations of livestock producers and even small producers whose animals are sick and dying because they were exposed to heavy rains and need to be saved. The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) Tekno Gabay program has identified livestock producers who are now applying technologies they have learned from the program. Let us finance the need of these small livestock producers for animal housing. I ask the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture to link with the DOST to provide ACEF assistance in grants in the most immediate time possible to save the animals and not waste the investment of poor producers.

5. I ask the Department of Agriculture Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources to identify the needs of the fisherfolk - like preservation and processing equipment - so that fish catch - both sea and inland could be processed and preserved.

6. I ask the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to employ the members of upland forest management cooperatives in food-for-work jobs to plant trees in the mountains using the budget for reforestation for 2009 and the share that the DENR will get from the Calamity Fund and donations from abroad. I am donating seedlings from my Luntiang Pilipinas stock.

7. From education and training institutions involved in the National Agriculture and Fisheries Education System (NAFES), I ask the extension program offices of the agriculture and fishery state universities and colleges (SUCs) to help the MAOs and the PAOs and the agriculture and fishery cooperatives in the preparation of the two-page feasibility study and in the monitoring of the Calamity Plan implementation for agriculture, forestry and fishery. I ask the Department of Education to include during these critical times in the lesson plans for elementary and high school integrated education that will base the topic on climate change. All subject matters in Social Studies, Science, Literature, Mathematics, Filipino, English, Technology and Livelihood, and Computer Studies should be related to climate change while we are in this season of great natural calamity. I ask the Bureau of Alternative Learning System (BALS) to devise the most appropriate subject matter content and mode of education delivery for farmers and fisherfolk in remote farming, fishing and forest communities and make education very functional for their needs. 8. I ask the Basic Needs Cluster of AFMA - the National Nutrition Council (NNC), the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), the Department of Health, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) and the CDA to implement now the basic needs framework and apply them to poor communities in farming and fisherfolk areas of potential SAFDZs. Please coordinate with the Bureau of Soil and Water Management. We do not want the producers of our food to go hungry and untreated when they are sick and their households to be depending on food aid. It is a sin to allow our food producers to be hungry.

        "I will convene the Congressional Oversight Committee on Agriculture and Fisheries once the DA has finalized its Calamity Plan with all the above proposals considered. But I ask all the above AFMA-implementing departments and agencies, cooperatives and groups to start thinking along these lines. I expect the Calamity Plan for Agriculture, Fishery and Forestry to be ready next week.," Loren declared.

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