To Awaken, PH Agriculture Needs A Robust Kiss From A Prince Charming!

Image from D23 (d23.com) – Unfortunately, it's the other way around – each of our PH Secretary of Agriculture has been sleeping on the job! since 1898, founding year of the DA. 1898 was a revolutionary year, except that the DA did not take up arms against the enemy – poverty among farmers and fishers.

Pertinently, former Agriculture Secretary William Dar, who continues to espouse what he calls "New Thinking For Agriculture," has come out with his Manila Times column titled "Increasing The Income Of Farmers And Fisherfolk" 1st of 2 parts (25 July 2019 (manilatimes.net), where he says:

I listened very carefully to the State of the Nation Address of President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday, and I commend his full support to leveling up the country's agriculture sector by investing in programs to increase the incomes of smallholder farmers and fisherfolk. ¶ This is a very powerful message from the President, as it clearly emphasizes increasing the income of agricultural smallholders.

With PH Agriculture as Sleeping Beauty, we have had a Sleeping Secretary for too many years! Not our Secretary of Agriculture in the time of President Erap – in fact, he (not Erap) made history by trebling the growth of PH Agriculture from minus (-7%) to plus (+14%)! That's treble the growth, treble the income. That's William Dar.

That's our Prince Charming. We need a Secretary like him to wake up PH Agriculture! He will need to make a big, resounding, robust kiss to do that. Otherwise, the fairy tale of our agriculture as Sleeping Beauty lives on.

So, Mr Dar is talking from personal experience when he says:

The main objective of the "New Thinking for Agriculture" is to double the income of farmers and fisherfolk in five years or even less. And it can be done!

Mr Dar is not only talking from personal experience of managing Philippine agriculture from the top. He cites the experience of India, where he lived for 15 long years when he was the Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT, until his compulsory retirement in 31 December 2014. He learned from India; India learned from him – now he's educating us about a new Indian agriculture initiative.

Now he cites India as working to make that double-income dream come true through that country's National Institution for Transforming India, NITI. He says:

The NITI paper, in the section "Sources of Growth for Farmers' Income," identified the following as the solutions to increase or double the income of farmers by 2022 or 2023: increase agricultural productivity, improve total productivity factor, diversify towards high-value crop production, increase crop intensity, improve terms of trade for farmers, and shift cultivators to non-farm and subsidiary activities.

Let me enumerate those, rephrasing each with the word robust repeated:

(1)   Robust productivity

(2)   Robust efficiency of production

(3)   Robust number of high value crops

(4)   Robust cropping intensity

(5)   Robust trade returns for farmers

(6)   Robust sponsorship of non-farm and subsidiary activities.

We need a robust-thinking Prince Charming
as Secretary of Agriculture!@517