Marcos Jr. revives father’s rice plan
Published on: Saturday, June 03, 2023
By: Inquirer
Bongbong and Marcos during their visits to the IRRI.
MANILA: President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. has approved a plan to redo a rice production programme called “Masagana 99” that his father, deceased former President Ferdinand Marcos, implemented in 1973.The President explained to rice industry stakeholders that the Masagana Rice Industry Development Programme aims to reach 97.5 percent rice sufficiency in five years.
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“I don’t think it has to be 100 percent … But I think 97.5 is a good enough number,” Marcos said during a Rice Industry Convergence Meeting in Quezon City.
“You don’t have to really go to 100 percent because the 3 percent are other niche products, organic ones, special grains, Japanese rice, things like that,” he said.
“At 97 percent, we can say that we can feed all our countrymen with enough rice and supplies,” Marcos added.
Press Secretary Cheloy Velicaria-Garafil said the President made the announcement after he approved the programme, obviously modelled after Masagana 99 which was implemented in 1973 amid a rice supply shortage.
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The programme, executed alongside an intensified land reform drive, involved government-backed funding for new technologies developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), founded only a decade prior.
The programme also involved the use of chemical fertilisers and insecticides that were later found to be harmful to health.
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By 1976, the government said farmers were producing bumper harvests unseen in generations—a claim still disputed today.
However, the lack of continuing support for the programme caused inexperienced farmers to default on their loans, leading to the sale of farmland they had just received from the government and widespread bank failures.
In a Senate hearing in 2020, former Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III, who was agriculture secretary from 1987 to 1989, claimed that he “cleaned up a mess” of 800 rural banks going bankrupt because of unpaid loans.
However, as finance minister from 2016-2022, Dominguez was also responsible for the government’s policy of agricultural importation that ruined thousands of rice, corn, hog, chicken, and sugar farmers all over the country.
Former Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol claimed that he advised against the long-term consequences of the all-out importation policy, but he was replaced.
That episode also directly caused the crop shortages, whether real or imagined, that the country is experiencing at this time.
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