Team Unity candidates bat for
P17B - P20B agri fund - Angara

A P17 to P20 billion a year allocation for agricultural modernization will be pushed by the Team Unity senatorial candidates after winning in the May 14 election to provide adequate funds for the modernization of the sector that covers at least 30 per cent of all economic activity in the country, Senator Edgardo J. Angara today said.

Angara said that providing enough funds for a sustained push to agricultural modernization is a "team consensus" of the Team Unity candidates , who are now barnstorming across the country to score a majority win.

He said that the 2007 budget for agricultural modernization is already more than P17 billion and the TU candidates, should they win, will set the 2007 appropriation as the base figure for state-funded modernization investments in the agri sector.

"We are, however, looking at the P20 billion-a-year-funding. The Team Unity candidates believe that this is the first step in easing the problems of hunger and poverty, which have a distinct rural face," said Angara.

Angara said that he prefers a laser-like focus on research and development, which, he said, is the most cost-efficient agricultural investment.

He said that breakthroughs in research and development will lead to an awesome pool of genetics and technologies that would give the Philippines a much-needed head start in modernizing agriculture.

He is also pushing for much-needed investments in post-harvest equipment and facilities, saying that losses due to the absence of post-harvest facilities cost the agricultural sector roughly P20 billion a year.

Angara has been pushing for a shift to easy-to-maintain, cheap-to-construct small water impounding dams instead of the giant irrigation dams that are costly and have been causing dislocation of people from their traditional communities.

Angara said that access to credit, marketing support, the training and retraining of agricultural personnel and managers should be part and parcel of the modernization program.

"The big dream is to create agricultural and fishery communities that are producing enough, are engaged in sophisticated marketing, are tied up to the seaports, are canning or processing part of their produce and are wired via information and communication technologies. These are our dream communities," said Angara, who, as agricultural secretary, started several frontier programs for agri modernization.