You say right away:
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.
Mr Ronquillo, those first 54 words from you are in their combined sense hyperbole – exaggerated and/or without proof given. It is also a logical fallacy called argumentum ad misericordiam, or appeal to pity, not appeal to reason. I studied those in Western Thought, UP Los Baños.
We must always appeal to reason. Now, “A man always has two reasons for doing anything,” says JP Morgan, “a good reason and the real reason.” Let’s see!
You say:
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.
Hasty generalization. You have not been reading, Mr Ronquillo.
You know, I came to know well William Dollente Dar, now PH Secretary of Agriculture, when he was still Director General, DG, of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT; he was DG from 2000 to 2014. ICRISAT was/is based in India; if the Indians sensed anything anomalous in ICRISAT transactions in those 15 years, they could have thrown the DG out the window!
A question of money? When William Dar retired from ICRISAT, its net asset was US$ 34,500,000.
ICRISAT hugged William Dar as DG for 15 years, because the Indians knew an honest man when they saw one!
ICRISAT, sister agency of the International Rice Research Institute, was dead last, kulelat, when William Dar came in; when he exited, ICRISAT was already #1 among the 15 international agricultural research centers under the umbrella of the CGIAR. William Dar, Phenomenal Team Captain!
You say:
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.
Read my lips, Makabayan Bloc, and Mr Ronquillo!
“PH Fertilizer Purchase: “We Saved P2.2 Billion” – Secretary Of Agriculture William Dar[2]”
That’s my own calculation from the data; that article I blogged 15 June 2020 (THiNK Journalism, Digital). No, gentlemen, the DA under William Dar did not engage in any fertilizer overprice deal – on the contrary, they engaged in a transaction that saved the PH Treasury some P2.2 Billion! If you gathered the facts first, you would not have written that column. William Dar knows his arithmetic even if we don’t know ours!
Look again, Mr Ronquillo – where is the vileness coming from?!@517
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