For three years running, Malacanang has been dishing out the same Christmas message, extolling the virtues of love, peace and happiness, nothing about a sanguine future, nothing about enough food in the pantry, nothing about relief from higher prices assurance that wages would rise next year.
Unlike the prophets Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Jeremiah, and Moses who foretold the coming of Jesus Christ, or in Psalms written by David that described the Messiah’s death, or the gifts of the Magi—gold, frankincense, and myrrh— Malacanang’s thrice-told Christmas homily appears more than lost. There is no gold for the Filipino people because its symbolism is about Christ’s kingship, not about the gold stolen from the people’s vaults. Neither is there frankincense, which stands for divinity, as there is nothing divine about “Bagong Pilipinas’ but there is culinary greatness in “Bolinao Bagoong” or “Bagoong Balayan.” There is myrrh for the teeming millions, and it was advanced to the 30,000 murdered by Duterte stormtroopers from 2016 to 2022. Myrrh symbolizes death as it is an embalming fluid. This gift reminds us of those killed by state forces running berserk, let loose by a regime at war with its own people.
The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) recognizes the shallowness of the Marcos Jr. Christmas message as it revolves around the myth of “Bagong Pilipinas,” an expensive slur that has cost the country billions. There is no blessed assurance that the P6.352-trillion 2025 national budget would be deployed to generate employment, fund an honest-to-goodness program to raise food production and do away with that pesky and irrational dependence on imports. The demand of Sen. Imee Marcos to slash P188-billion from the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) budget is like segueing into the discordant harmony of legislative plunderers. It does not diminish the original sin and cannot absolve Marcos Jr. of his role in creating the 2025 budget bill.
Vetoing it purportedly to “thoroughly examine” the budget proposal is a bad operetta since all the key players in the budget-making process are kindred divided into two moieties—the Marcoses and the Romualdezes— and their cohorts who pumped in P289 billion to the DPWH, ostensibly for projects to be dispersed into congressional districts in time for the midterm elections. Congress and Malacanang plotted the insertion of P289 billion into the DPWH budget despite the department’s not asking for it. The budget itself is the error, and it has been compounded by the insertion of P26 billion for the redundant doleout called AKAP, P5 billion for the Senate and P21 billion for the Lower House.
Farmers who have lost billions since the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL) was willy-nilly enacted have condemned not only the Duterte regime but also the Marcos Jr. dispensation for killing the rice industry, driving landless farmers to penury, punishing rice millers, and enriching the favored rentiers, the traders who belong to politically entrenched families who win import contracts hands down, with no need for competitive bidding. When Malacanang was roundly criticized for fixing sugar and rice import volumes, other people’s heads rolled, not the one most responsible for the flap. The buck always stops elsewhere. The regime cannot reduce rice prices and their magic bullet—unbridled importations – has proved that RTL is a sham and fueled the suspicion that the rice industry is being primed for execution.
Marcos Jr. isn’t glib and he is not charismatic by any means. Repeating the same Christmas message three years in a row is bad for an entire country waiting to be energized as the year draws to a close. They are not being energized; they are getting electrocuted with 3.7 million metric tons (MMT) of rice imports, 30,000 MT of imported fish laced with formalin, carabeef from India, and huge volumes of prime meat cuts disguised as cheap mechanically deboned meat (MDM.) Instead of crafting a viable food production program, the government, through its dubious Maharlika Investment Corp. (MIC) is talking about establishing agricultural estates to attract foreign investors. In his public statements, these so-called “agricultural estates” would cover state lands and private lands, which signals the possible purchases or leases of farms already distributed to agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs.)
Naturally, MIC’s Joel Consing is a true-blue believer in the magic of these agricultural estates similar to the Dutch colonial “cultuurstelsel” (cultivation system in English or “tanam paksa” in Indonesian), which compelled Indonesians to plant coffee or other export crops on portions of their lands. The policy was implemented for coffee until the early 20th century but lasted only from 1830 to 1870 for other export crops. Most farmers were forced to plant export crops, enriching the Dutch. Instead on enriching Indonesian peasants, they were forced to produce crops for the export market and not for the domestic market, leading to shortages of food crops.
The Filipino version of “cultuurstelsel” would be similar to the landlord’s ruse of organizing ARBs into coops and signing production deals with these coops, reducing the newly-minted landowning farmers into agricultural workers. This scam led to ARBs losing their land altogether, their wages cut and their earnings reduced by deductions. To sweeten the deal, Consing also contemplates using farming areas for telco towers and solar power collectors for the use of the estates or sale to power grids. Big ideas, indeed, for a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) that was funded not by the accumulated wealth of the state but by the forcible collection of cash from Land Bank, which manages the Agrarian Reform Fund (ARF), and other government-owned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs.) That’s keeping up with the Joneses, isn’t it? And it smacks of luxuriating on xeroxed wealth.
