Nine months since he took office – and, along with it, the agriculture portfolio – President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said his administration still isn’t done “fixing” the Department of Agriculture.

“Hindi pa tapos ‘yung pag-aayos natin ng Department of Agriculture. Ngunit, dahan-dahan alam na namin ‘yung kailangan natin gawin (We are not yet done fixing the DA. But we’re slowly understanding what we need to do),” he said on Monday, April 24, in an interview on state-run radio with Erwin Tulfo, Marcos’ former social services chief.

Marcos was painfully slow to fill his Cabinet when he resumed office – infamously convening his first Cabinet meeting without heads for the health, energy, science and technology, environment, and housing portfolios. To this day, the health department is headed by an officer-in-charge.

Marcos by then had decided he’d be agriculture chief himself.

In January 2023, despite calls from both critics and allies to appoint a full-time chief to head the DA, Marcos insisted he would remain its chief because there were supposedly some people in that sector who would only listen to the President. There are no signs of someone else taking over.

Yet even with the chief executive at the DA’s helm, the prices of basic goods – sugar and eggs, for instance – have shot up during certain periods in the Philippines. Marcos’ first executive secretary was infamously sacked following an importation mess over sugar.

There have also been concerns – and even congressional probes – into the smuggling of basic products.

His promise to bring the price of rice down to just P20/kilo has also remained but a dream. Even at Kadiwa ng Pangulo, a DA-led event where farmers and food producers get to sell their items directly to consumers, the cheapest rice has been at P22/kilo.

“Kaya’t siguro naman ‘yung 20 piso, siguro down the road mapapaabot natin ‘yan. Ngunit mas mahalaga kaysa sa… ‘yung mga specific na produkto ay makaabot ang Kadiwa sa maraming lugar,” said Marcos.

(Maybe the P20/kilo price, down the road, we’ll be able to achieve that. But more important than specific products is for Kadiwa to reach more areas.)

Thus far, Marcos said there are over 300 Kadiwa markets operating around the country – and he has plans to open more.

The concept of Kadiwa is an old one – from the time of Marcos’ father and namesake, the dictator.

Back in December 2022, when asked about Kadiwa’s sustainability, Marcos said the goal was to “get to a point where it’s no longer necessary, where the prices in the markets are the same as what we can give in the Kadiwa.” But with a new promise to expand Kadiwa even more, what’s the concurrent DA chief’s real goal, then? – Rappler.com