MANNY Piñol breathes farming, knows to farm, and– whenever he is without a pen and a paper– lives farming.
An exclusive Pinoy Publiko visit to his Kidapawan farm in Cotabato before the New Year could attest to the simplest of his joys. He tills the land that sustains life like how it was eons ago.
There, he has everything he needs. Plants and trees are everywhere, providing food and shade to his livestock. And themselves.
Piñol is not unaffected by the volatile pricing of onion and other agricultural products, however. As a former Agriculture Secretary, he had seen this before when he faced the biggest challenge of his career as a public servant.
Those who know him say he was a victim of circumstances. Or more likely of the powerplay that abounds in the administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte, who made Piñol a sacrificial cow if only retain his popularity while the prices of basic commodities skyrocketed to where they are today– including rice, meat, and onion.
Piñol blames “a sick and flawed marketing system deeply rooted in our culture” for the unaffordable prices of these commodities.
He said these basic food commodities pass through “at least 10 hands” from the farm gate before they reach the Filipino kitchen.
From the farmer, each commodity goes through the community dicer, the town trader, the consolidator, the wholesale buyer, the market distributor, until it reaches the vendors.
Prices escalate when these products reach “big traders who control the post-harvest and storage facilities for commodities like onion and rice, (and) connive among themselves to create an artificial shortage and manipulate the prices.”
He knows what he’s saying as when he was Secretary of Agriculture, he battled with the proponents of the free market policy who flooded the market with huge volumes of imported rice on the belief that this would lower the prices due to the “law of supply and demand.”
They were wrong. Piñol said traders and middlemen control the market system. Transport of these goods is also costly that it affects the prices. It’s when these goods reach these areas that market manipulation transpires.
He quit Duterte’s team before he could be sacked for unfounded accusations of corruption. He was cleared by the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission (PACC) after seven months of investigation.
Piñol is now Food Security Adviser to Secretary Clarita Carlos of the National Security Agency. He had submitted a recommendation to reactivate the Food Terminal Incorporated under the National Grains Authority to ensure food security and arrest food inflation.
He said the government should only concentrate on making rice, fish, meat, vegetables, and fruits affordable to the masses by establishing FTI buying stations and cold storage facilities in the agricultural production areas of the country, especially in Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, Metro Davao, and Baguio City.
They will then sell the goods consolidated from the FTI Buying Stations all over the country at prices with minimal markup to cover the operational costs and ethical profit to keep FTI viable.
Piñol does not claim the recommendation as his original idea. It has been done and it worked in the past.
He said it will work again anytime. Manipulative traders would be sidelined if the government would take control of these five most basic commodities.
The private sector, he said, could take care of the other Filipino basic needs. All Piñol needs, however, are the attentive ears of the main resident of the Palace.
He better listen to one with a better experience in tilling lands.
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