Foreseeing a possible food crisis, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” R. Marcos Jr. ordered officials of the Department of Agriculture (DA) to make sure that there is sufficient and affordable food in the country.
Marcos is concurrently serving as the country’s agriculture secretary “at least for now.”
He noted that the country needs to attend to the impending food crisis that is expected to strike in the next two quarters.
“We have to think hard about making sure that people have the same...sufficient food, at (and) number one, at price that they can afford. Because again it is useless to have food if you cannot afford it anyway,” he told the executives of the DA during their closed-door meeting on Monday, July 4.
Marcos noted that the country needs to increase its production of rice, corn, and fish to have an ample supply of food such as livestock.
“The other side of it is on the longer term we need to come up with a multiyear plan to really construct our value chain. And that is for me is the important thing because kapag nagawa na iyan (when we have done that), these are starters,” he said.
The President, who is also heading the agriculture department, urged the DA officials to tell them in the Office of the President if they need executive orders or EOs or legislation.
“You draft them already and you give them to us. And we will see kung ano ang gagamitin namin doon (if what we would use from those),” he said.
“n the longer term, we really have to reconstruct our value chain starting from our scientists and our researchers all the way to the Kadiwa Store So, we have to remake that model. We have a good model that was from a previous administration but it is very different world out there,” Marcos added.