Early today, a follower of this page sent me the link to a news item published by the Philippine Star with the screaming headline “DA fails to complete P2.7B farm-to-market roads, says COA.”
While the data cited in the news item were accurate, the headline was not because it is not the Department of Agriculture which implements the Farm-to-Market-Road Program but the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).
The government’s General Appropriations Act (GAA) has included a special provision which says that while the funding for the FMRs is part of the Agriculture Department’s annual budgetary allocation, the implementation of the projects is undertaken by DPWH.
In fact, as it is now, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) automatically turns over the budget for the construction of FMRs, which for 2018 has a budget of P6-B, to the DPWH.
It is the Agriculture Department which identifies the road projects but it is the DPWH which conducts the bidding, awards and supervises the construction.
For this, DPWH gets a 3% administrative supervision fee which is taken from the whole budget or P180-M of the P6-funding, equivalent to 18 kilometres of FMRs.
When I assumed office as Secretary of Agriculture, I questioned this set up because after the funds are turned over to DPWH, the Agriculture Department is kept in total darkness as to how the FMR projects are implemented.
The previous DA leadership engaged the services of a consultancy firm, the Sustainable Development Solutions Corporation (SDSC) to monitor the implementation of the FMRs and its report was what was used by the Commission on Audit in blaming the DA.
The report, a copy of which was given to me by SDSC, indicated that the most irregular implementation of the FMRs under the previous administration was in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) where 114 FMRs were never constructed.
On Thursday, during the first hearing of the Agriculture Department’s budget for 2018, I brought up before members of the Appropriations Committee this problem and asked that the implementation of the FMRs should be undertaken by the DA itself since the funding is part of the department’s budget.
I pointed out that with the “BUILD, BUILD, BUILD” campaign of DPWH now, it is mainly focused on big ticket projects and small FMRs may not get the same prioritisation in the implementation.
During the same hearing, I also asked Congress that the implementation of the Rural Roads Program be rationalised by assigning the task to just one specific agency.
As things stand now, the Dept. of Interior and Local Govt., the Dept. of Tourism, the Dept. of Social Welfare Services, the Dept. of Agrarian Reform, the Phil. Coconut Authority, the Sugar Regulatory Administration, the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process, the Dept. of Trade and Industry in addition to the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries are involved in the construction of rural roads.
Already, the DAF has recorded one case where the SRA’s sugar road project overlapped with an FMR implemented by the Agriculture Department under the Philippine Rural Development Program.
Unless this set up is corrected and the implementation of the Rural Road Program is rationalised, government will be wasting billions and still fail to build the roads needed by the farmers and fisher folks to bring food items to the market.
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