A national learning disability
Ours is a country with a serious learning disability. Signs of it are all around us, both at macro (aggregate) and micro (individual) levels. For one, we elect leaders who promise us heaven but keep giving us hell—and we keep voting them into power anyway.
We shake our heads over problems that haunt us daily: costly food, time-wasting traffic, perennial floods, rising criminality that has moved on from the streets into cyberspace, malnutrition with impaired learning in our children, woeful public health facilities, garbage and litter everywhere, growing political dynasties, massive theft of our hard-earned taxes that should be funding our nation’s path to prosperity, and more. You’d think that through decades of grappling with all these, we would have learned how to overcome them better by now. But learning from both our own failures and our neighbors’ successes seems something we are simply incapable of. So we’ve found ourselves getting worse, not better, with each passing decade. Indonesia overtook us on average income (and everything that comes with it) in the first decade of this century. Then Vietnam went past us by the end of the second. Will Cambodia do the same within this current one?
Learning disability due to severe malnutrition and stunting is very real for too many Filipino children, putting their futures and that of our nation at risk. And I’m convinced that most of our country’s woes ultimately trace back to how we have failed our farms and farmers. This is why I call agriculture our economy’s backbone. I’ve offered three reasons for this before (see “The economy’s backbone,” 4/4/23). I’d argue further that if only we could fix agriculture to perform like it does in our neighbors such as Vietnam and Thailand, fixes to a lot of our nation’s problems would fall into place.
But a severe case of learning disability lies at the core of our government’s handling of agriculture. We simply refuse to learn age-old lessons from the sector, believing that approaches, policies, and practices that never worked for us before can somehow yield different results. Einstein had a stronger word for it: insanity. Across four decades and 18 agriculture secretaries, I’ve said and written much on what’s wrong with how we’ve governed Philippine agriculture, and how we can fix it. Nearly everything other frustrated researchers and I have said for 40 years remains applicable to this day. At times, I feel tired and tempted to give up on the sector. I get the same exasperation voiced by National Scientist and respected guru Dr. Emil Q. Javier who, asked why he ceased writing his regular agriculture commentaries in another newspaper, replied, “I’m tired, as no one listens anyway.”
Let me cite specifics. I wrote about our seven failures in agriculture three years ago (see “Seven deadly sins,” 6/14/22), and will not repeat them here. I will just mention one with far-reaching implications that relates to the other six: the Department of Agriculture’s inordinate focus on farm production, versus the entire value chain, including consumers. It’s a failure in systems thinking, and leads the DA to keep behaving as if farmers were their only constituency, forgetting their accountability to food consumers, and everyone in the value chain in between, especially food manufacturers and other agri-based industries whose well-being is important if farmers are to thrive. In DA’s traditional mindset, anything beyond the farm gate was someone else’s problem. But for as long as they fail to balance the interests of farmers with food consumers and the key players in between, they’ll never get it right.
Trade policy is a case in point. Shielding farmers from competition via import restrictions and high tariffs indeed helps them, but inflicts wide collateral damage of higher costs on food manufacturers, agri-processors and all consumers. Yet, the government can opt to give focused help to farmers, including interim cash if need be, without senselessly hurting all the above who far outnumber them. The government must instead help them compete better, until imports need not be a threat, by reducing costs through higher productivity—via public goods with long-term benefits like reliable irrigation, postharvest, transport and logistics systems; not by giving private goods with a one-time benefit like seeds and fertilizers.
A productive farm sector yields lower-priced, hence widely accessible food. This will translate into improved nutrition for the poor, thus healthier brains and better learning outcomes in children. The eventual result is a healthy, well-educated populace better-equipped to create wealth and more likely to elect righteous leaders to perpetuate a virtuous cycle of good governance and inclusive prosperity for all. But we must first find a way to overcome the national learning disability that leads us astray today.
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cielito.habito@gmail.com
