MANILA, Philippines—Last July 1, the first of 10 “town hall” meetings was held by the Movement for Good Governance (MGG) at the Asian Institute of Management in Makati.
As the MGG describes it, these meetings are “highly interactive meetings with presidential candidates, designed to engage them in a discussion on key public issues one topic at a time.”
Education and agriculture
During the first town hall meeting on education, Philippine Business for Education (PBE) president Chito Salazar said that the main problem was that the governance of education was more focused on the politician than the student.
The late Victor Ordoñez of Unesco Asia-Pacific had said that the global norm was to allocate 5-6 percent of a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) to education. But Salazar said that the Philippines allocates only 2.5-3 percent, significantly behind Malaysia’s 6.2 percent and Thailand’s 4.3 percent.
Combined with bad governance, it is no wonder that the quality of education has deteriorated.
What happened to education appears to also have happened to agriculture. Is the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) P48.5-billion budget in 2009 (which is more than thrice its 2005 level) being used with good or bad governance?
We do not know. The year is more than half over, but there is still no systematic private sector monitoring of DA budget use. However, thanks to a reinvigorated government-private sector National Agriculture and Fishery Council (NAFC) under the leadership of Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap, this monitoring may finally take place.
With this monitoring will come farmers’ hope for good governance.
This coming July 8, the Alyansa Agrikultura will be getting a regional DA budget breakdown, which will then be monitored at a decentralized level by the Agricultural Fishery Councils (AFCs) and other farmer organizations.
2010 to 2016
But hope for the farmers should not be limited to DA budget monitoring in 2009.
Assuming there is no constitutional assembly (Con-ass), which the Alyansa Agrikultura is vehemently opposing, the farmers should now work with the other sectors to select a president in 2010 who will give high priority to agriculture and its good governance from 2010 to 2016.
This is where the MGG provides hope for the longer term.
The MGG states: “We acknowledge that we have no time to lose if we are to arrest the country’s continuing slide toward greater corruption and ineffective government. We will, therefore, exert an all-out effort to achieve as much as we can in promoting our ideals and objectives in the 2010 elections, including the possible election of the most reform-oriented and capable next president of the country.”
A target of 10 million reform-minded Filipino voters will be enough to tip the balance in favor of a good candidate.
Innovations
A very important MGG innovation is the use of town hall meetings, one subject at a time (e.g., education, agriculture, health, etc.) to determine where each presidential candidate stands.
Reform-minded listeners then rate each candidate on five criteria: Competence, commitment, consistency, courage, and clarity and conciseness.
When the subject of agriculture is taken up at a later MGG town hall meeting, it is hoped that this widely disseminated session will help us choose the presidential candidate who can best serve agriculture and the nation for the next six years.
For more information on MGG and the future ratings on presidential candidates for each key subject, please visit www.wedeservebetter.ph.
(The author is chair of Agriwatch, former secretary for presidential flagship programs and projects, and former undersecretary for agriculture, and trade and industry. For inquiries and suggestions, e-mail agriwatchphil@yahoo.com or telefax (02) 8522112.)
