The government’s approach of giving farmers cash assistance and handouts as its primary agricultural intervention is wrong, counterproductive, and breeds dependence rather than productivity, former Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel “Manny” Piñol said Wednesday.
The former Agriculture chief made the statement in an interview on DZRH News program The Situation Report on September 9, issuing one of his sharpest criticisms of how successive governments have approached the agricultural sector.
Piñol said the government has long operated on the assumption that it can make farmers happy simply by giving them money—a mindset he said is fundamentally flawed.
He said ayuda-driven farm programs do not just fail to solve poverty, saying they actively make it worse by creating a culture of dependency that discourages self-reliance and hard work.
“Ang isang kritisismo ko diyan ay yung mentalidad ng ating mga opisyal sa gobyerno na para sumaya yung isang sektor o yung grupo ng mamamayan, bigyan mo lang ayuda. That’s wrong, because we are actually breeding indolence,” Piñol said.
Piñol stressed that what farmers actually need is a fair price for what they produce and a logistics system that gets their goods to market.
“If you would have time, and I’m addressing our national policy makers, please find time, go to the countryside, kausapin niyo yung mga farm companies, and they will tell you na kapag nag-release kayo ng ayuda on a certain date, one whole week walang trabahante,” Piñol said.
The former Agriculture chief said what farmers are actually asking for is not ayuda but simply a fair chance to earn, such as a price for their produce that covers their cost of production and gives them a decent income, and a logistics system that connects their farms to markets efficiently.
Piñol said the government’s failure to understand this has produced the Philippines’ current agricultural crisis—with farmers abandoning crops not because they are lazy, but because the system makes farming unprofitable regardless of how hard they work.
