EDITORIAL : THE DAILY TRIBUNE, THE PHILIPPINES

 

 

From enchanted to disconnected

EDITORIAL

07/03/2011
Matching Noynoy’s promises, particularly his vow to uplift the lives of Filipinos by spending judiciously and the actual situation under his administration is a study in contrast.
One of the new promises he dished out during his speech marking his first year in office was to make the country self-sufficient in rice, the staple food of the now 90 million Filipinos within two years.
The vow was an appeal for support among Filipinos in as much as it targets a solid gut issue, the availability of food in the Filipino table.
Near the end of his first year in office, rating agencies released surveys showing the approval and trust ratings of Noynoy slipping to the low 70 percentage from the previous mid-80 as many noticed his disconnect with the problems the nation is facing.
The promise of rice self-sufficiency is another proof of this disconnection.
Noynoy only needed to ask any farmer to figure out the reality that such a vow would be next to impossible to achieve.
Foremost of the country’s problem on farm production is something that his family is very familiar with, which is the distribution of land to the tillers.
The administration of his mother, President Cory Aquino, claimed to bring about genuine land reform as the lynchpin of her social agenda.
Being part of the landlord elite, the first thing Cory did was to exempt her hacienda from land reform. Cory allowed her family-owned Hacienda Luisita to be the first to go around the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) through the introduction of a novel corporate farm structure.
Now Hacienda Luisita farmers are still knocking at the doors of Malacañang, which is now occupied by Cory’s son, to receive what is due them under the law.
With Hacienda Luisita resistant to land reform, other big estates continue to deny farmers land ownership. Those who conceived CARP had stated that self-sufficiency needed to start from each farm family to be able to produce in commercial quantities and thus spur development in the countrysides.
Noynoy sees the nation becoming self-sufficient in rice because of what he claimed as extensive farm infrastructure that his administration had put up just in its first year in office.
This is inconsistent with what actually happened during the first year of his term.
Until May, Noynoy’s budget shows huge underspending that even Budget Secretary Butch Abad had admitted.
Abad said in a statement that expenditures amounted to P129.7 billion in the fifth month of this year, reflecting a 15.7 percent increase from month-ago’s P112.1 billion but lower than year-ago’s P140.24 billion.
Former Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno said the underspending would have reached P53 billion until last May.
The massive underspending resulted in record surpluses in the first few months of the year but at the same time resulted in economic growth to skid to a little more than four percent in the first quarter after a record 7.6 percent growth last year.
That brings up the point about the roads and irrigation facilities that Noynoy is bragging about in his first year speech.
Where did the money come from in putting up these infrastructures if the budget does not show it?
These structures may have been part of the projects already ongoing when he took over the presidency a year ago which means that Noynoy is again grabbing credit for achievements of his much maligned predecessor Gloria and perhaps, even of the Estrada administration, which was into the big push for irrigation.
Noynoy’s administration has been hitting on the profligacy of Arroyo in the use of public funds but now he must be claiming the achievements of that same criticized trait of Gloria.
What’s more, despite the inability of his administration to efficiently use the budget allotted to it this year, Noynoy wants a 10 percent increase in his budget for next year to something like P1.8 trillion, with among the biggest increase being in the cash handouts that Dinky Soliman wants to be doubled to nearly P54 billion in the 2012 budget.
Just watch Noynoy speak glowingly about the non-existent achievements of his administration.
The country had been taken to the Enchanted Kingdom for nine years, now it is thrown into a limbo of a disconnected administration.