Murang Kuryente Party-list Rep. Arthur Yap has suggested what he described as a "more intelligent" use of the Maharlika Investment Fund (MIF) amid the economic hardships that the country is going through due to the fuel price crisis.

Yap made this pitch during the first marathon hearing of the 13-committee Legislative Energy Action Development (LEAD) Council at the House of Representatives on Wednesday afternoon, April 8.

According to Yap, consumer relief through targeted electricty subsidy must be matched by a serious financing strategy for the country’s agriculture sector.

He reckoned that the MIF must be used positively and deliberately — not as a grant pool or subsidy wallet, but as a commercial tail-risk structure that allows banks, rural banks, and foreign debt funds to lend to farmers at scale.

Maharlika’s own public investment direction for 2026 identifies agriculture as one of its strategic pillars, alongside energy, logistics, and mining. The Maharlika Investment Corporation (MIC), the Philippines' first sovereign wealth fund manager, has publicly said it intended to continue funding agricultural projects to transform Philippine agriculture into a high-yield engine of food security, Yap noted.

“Maharlika must be used, but it must be used correctly. It should stand at the tail end of the risk curve and answer only for catastrophic rural credit losses. The probability of total loss is low, but the presence of that protection can unlock scaled rural credit to millions,” the party-list lawmaker said.

Yap says the proper use of Maharlika is to establish a national escrow facility, first-loss reserve, or similar commercial credit-enhancement mechanism that covers only defined catastrophic outcomes.

In this structure, Yap said, Maharlika does not replace private lenders and does not function as a subsidy fund. Instead, it strengthens the credit profile of agricultural lending so that much larger pools of private capital can enter the sector with confidence.

Yap said this is the more intelligent use of sovereign-backed capital: not to hand out money, but to make agricultural credit bankable at scale.

Maharlika’s legal basis is as an investment fund managed by the MIC, and MIC’s current public posture supports commercially oriented deployment into priority sectors, including agriculture.

Yap stressed that the country’s real problem in rural credit is not the total absence of lenders, but the fact that catastrophic agricultural risk remains insufficiently structured. He said that without a credible tail-risk layer, lenders either stay out, price loans too high, demand excessive collateral, or remain trapped at limited pilot scale.

With the right reserve-backed mechanism in place, credit can move faster and deeper into farm production, helping protect yields, stabilize planting decisions, and support food supply. That approach is consistent with Maharlika’s own stated focus on agriculture as a strategic investment area tied to food security, irrigation, agri-business growth, and supply-chain efficiency, he further noted.

Yap underscored that the Philippines does not need more fragmented responses, but a system.

For households, that means targeted and visible relief through electric billing; for agriculture, that means using Maharlika in a commercially disciplined way to absorb catastrophic tail-end losses and mobilize larger private rural credit flows, he said.

“The point is to use the systems government already has,” Yap said. “Use the electric bill to deliver fast and visible ayuda (aid). Use Maharlika to create the risk structure that allows private capital to fund agriculture at scale.”

Also during the LEAD Council hearing, Yap said that temporary consumer relief should be delivered through the country’s existing power-billing system and targeted to residential users in the 51 to 300 kilowatt-hour (kWh) monthly consumption band.

He says this is the practical middle segment that government can reach quickly and visibly through monthly bills, while avoiding duplication with the existing lifeline structure.

“The electric bill is one of the cleanest ways to deliver targeted relief. Government should use the billing systems that already exist instead of building another slow and leak-prone disbursement channel,” said Yap.