The Philippine Center for Rural Development Studies (Centro Saka), a farmer-based policy advocacy and research non-government organization chided government for citing external factors to explain the agriculture sector's performance.

Centro Saka was reacting to a recent government report, which came out in the media attributing the positive performance of the agriculture sector to the absence of El Niño. Government should stop looking to the heavens, according to Centro Saka and start seriously implementing agricultural modernization "on the ground."

"When the agriculture sector declines, government says it's because of El Niño, when it grows, it's because of the absence of El Nino. Is this an implicit admission that government is relying on the weather and doing very little to promote agricultural growth and modernization?" Centro Saka Executive Director Omi Royandoyan remarked. 

Royandoyan decried government's failure to fully implement agricultural modernization as envisioned in the Agri Fisheries Modernization Act (AFMA). The AFMA stipulated 17 billion pesos of additional annual funding for agriculture on top of the regular allocated budget for the agriculture department. Last year's P14.3 billion allocation and this year's proposed P15.7 billion budget clearly falls short.  

"The remarkable growth experienced by countries like Brazil and Thailand was powered by their strong agriculture sectors. If we want long-term, sustainable growth, we cannot afford to neglect the modernization of agriculture." Royandoyan added.

Government spending on agriculture has barely grown under the administration of Mrs. Arroyo. Overall government expenditures for agriculture in 2004 even declined to P25.26 billion, or less than 3% of the overall budget while it was  P28.72 billion or 4.21% of the total budget in 2000.

Centro Saka agreed with government's acknowledgment that growth has so far done little for the poor. The organization cited a recent survey by the Social Weather Station in March 2006 that more and more people are going hungry despite all the hype about the strong peso and last year's modest economic growth. The hunger level rose from 16.7 percent in December 2005 to an all-time high of 16.9 percent in March of this year!