Billions Wasted! Animal Dispersal Program: Noble Intent, Bad Results

Good intentions to help the poor rural families by giving them cattle, carabao, sheep or goats to raise do not always end up with positive results.
I say so basing from my own experience as a Rural Economic Development specialist and a local government executive who witnessed how all of the well-intentioned but poorly planned programs of government failed and wasted billions of scarce funds.
One of the best examples of these poorly planned programs was the Animal Dispersal Program of both the national government agencies and the local government units.
The idea was to give poor rural families farm animals – cattle, carabao, goats or sheep – to raise and soon they would be lifted from their miserable lives.
Beautiful plans, bad results.
This is precisely the reason why even after billions had been spent and thousands of Cattle and Dairy Cows distributed to farming families, the country only has a 2.8-million cattle population and imports 98% of its dairy requirements.
As a young Governor of North Cotabato from 1998 to 2007, I naively believed that by giving farmers in my province Carabaos they would be able to plow the fields, plant corn or rice, harvest their crops, earn little money and live happily ever after.
Of course, all love stories do not have beautiful endings.
In many cases, farmers sold or slaughtered their animals when they faced financial difficulties like when they had to produce money for their children’s tuition fees, medical needs or simply to fund their vices.
Learning from this experience, I later decided to buy a fleet of tractors and offered a “Plow Now Pay Later Program” which proved to be more effective than giving out Carabaos.
Government must seriously review its Animal Dispersal Program, especially its Cattle Program, and consider the idea of a community Cattle Feed Lot approach which was designed when I was Secretary of Agriculture.
The program calls for the establishment of a community Cattle Breeding and Fattening Lot where residents of one village are all owners and who will share equally proceeds from the sale of the animals.
This is made more viable now by the Sorghum Planting Program which the Southseas Agri-Aqua Ventures, Inc., a small company which I, Senator Panfilo Lacson, Rocky French, Michael Ray Aquino and three other friends formed recently.
With the Sorghum Program, at least 20 tons of stalks and leaves could be harvested per hectare and turned into silage to be fed to Cattle raised in the paddocks at very low cost.
There are now several successful models of breeding, raising and fattening Cattle in feedlots led by the Adelaide River Farm of Polomolok, South Cotabato owned by outstanding OFW Arnel Corpuz and his friend, Paul Alcoriza.
This model is now being replicated in Abra, Ilocos Norte and other provinces.
While these farms are privately owned, these could serve as a template for an Animal Dispersal Program which would result in livelihood earnings for poor families in the rural areas.
#GovernanceIsCommonSense!
#KungGustoMaramingParaan!