Because the seeds were given out free as part of a government program to boost rural productivity, Mang Jaime thought he would be able to save at least P600. He usually spends P3,000 every cropping season  to buy farm inputs like  fertilizers, pesticides and seeds.

But when harvest time came last October, Mang Jaime’s one-hectare field yielded only 19 sacks of grain, while his neighbor, who bought palay seeds from a private supplier, harvested 60 sacks per hectare.

Mang Jaime thinks he should have known better. He was hesitant to use the seeds that came from the DA’s provincial office. But this was the first time in his 20 years of tilling the land that farmers in his area had been offered government assistance.

The fertile, river-fed plains of Sultan Kudarat are among the most productive rice-growing areas of Mindanao. Farming is the main livelihood of two-thirds of the province’s over 500,000 residents. This is an area that should be a major beneficiary of government assistance for agriculture.

But in interviews in three major rice-growing towns in this province, farmers complained about the kind of support they had been receiving from the DA: low quality planting materials, unhealthy farm animals, and undelivered farm equipment. Farmers say that if they get DA assistance at all, it is usually too little too late, or as in Mang Jaime’s case, it brings more harm than good.

At the root of these problems, both former and current DA officials say, is an agriculture bureaucracy that is mired in what DA consultant and once DA undersecretary for policy and planning V. Bruce Tolentino calls a culture of “corruption and waste.”

Analysts say that this culture is partly responsible for the lackadaisical performance of Philippine agriculture, which has been growing at an average of one to 1.7 percent from 1980 to 1997, compared to 2.8 to 5.9 percent in other Asian countries.

Agriculture and food security are supposed to be the centerpiece of the Estrada government’s poverty reduction program. For 2000, the proposed budget for the agriculture department is a hefty P21 billion, up from P14.9 billion last year. But this investigation shows that unless the prevailing culture in the DA is reformed, the delivery of agricultural services will remain problematic, and a big chunk of the funds set aside for raising rural productivity will end up wasted or stolen.

Complaints filed at the DA Resident Ombudsman’s office and reports submitted to the Commission on Audit (COA) and the Office of the Ombudsman as well as interviews with agriculture analysts, farmers in Sultan Kudarat,  and regional and national DA officials, attest to a pattern of graft, corruption and inefficiency in the DA that has resulted in the misuse or diversion of funds intended to provide support for farmers in the form of planting materials, machinery and breeding animals.

In the 1970s, under the tenure of Secretary Arturo Tanco, implementation of DA programs was devolved to Regional Field Units (RFU), in an effort to make delivery of services more efficient and responsive to local needs.

Every year, the DA allots big sums to subsidize the production costs of farmers. Depending on the program of the current DA secretary, these subsidies come in the form of either dole-outs or soft loans. For these, RFUs get funds from a nationwide productivity program such as “Makamasa” or “Gintong Ani” on top of their annual allocations from the central office. RFUs also have the power to decide how the money is going to be used and when it will be released.

In theory, the principle is sound. RFUs know the situation on the ground, and can implement programs as they see fit, without having to go through the DA bureaucracy. Farmers’ lives are dependent on weather patterns and delays in the delivery of farm inputs can have disastrous consequences.

But Tolentino and other DA officials say that the discretion given to RFUs has only made them notorious for graft and inefficiency. Because the DA bureaucracy is “weak, fragmented and uncoordinated,” Tolentino adds, there is no effective monitoring of regional units.

“There’s a huge amount of waste,” he says. “For example, December na, people in the RFUs are worried hindi ko pa nagastos ang pera ko (we haven’t spent our funds). So they’ll do all kinds of weird things just to close the books by December. They’ll commit money to half-finished projects, or half-thought projects or weird and crazy ideas.”

Based on complaints and cases filed against DA employees, the most common method used by corrupt officials is to divert funds meant for farm inputs into buying costly and worthless items. In auditing parlance, this is known as “technical malversation.”

This was the case in the DA’s Regional Field Unit in lahar-ravaged Central Luzon, where P1.5 million meant to buy corn for distribution to farmers was used to buy 4,000 document keepers instead.  The DA legal division has found that these document keepers were overpriced by 50 percent; no public bidding was held to buy them; and the supplier delivered only 70 percent of the contract he had been paid for.

Another method is to rig the bidding process. The DA central office has required that procurements must go through public biddings to ensure the government of quality purchases at the cheapest prices. Suppliers are also required to post a bond prior to taking part in the bidding to ensure that they will not renege on their commitments.

But RFUs and other DA bureaus and agencies are given leeway to bend the rules. As a result, they have managed to do away with bids in favor of negotiated purchases from favored suppliers. Or, even if public biddings take place, officials allegedly maneuver behind-the-scenes to ensure that certain suppliers bag coveted contracts.

For example, from 1990 to 1992, the DA Central Office used P100 million meant to buy fertilizers for the Rice Production Enhancement Program and to fund land-reform related projects to print information manuals instead. In a report, the DA Resident Auditor said these transactions were “not only highly anomalous but tainted with fraud, collusion and deceit.” He said that the manuals were contracted without public bidding; they were three times more expensive than they should be; and there was no immediate need for them.

At the RFUs, anomalies related to rigged bids have resulted in substandard and overpriced farm inputs or worse, “ghost deliveries” of much-needed seeds or fertilizers. Corrupt DA officials look the other way because they get “commissions” ranging from 10 to 50 percent of the total contract, DA officials and employees allege.

This was apparent in the Cordillera  Administrative Region (CAR), where the private suppliers themselves confessed that they were compelled to fork out grease money so they can get contracts from the RFUs

In an affidavit, Martina Yodong, owner of the Salidummay Construction and Merchandise, alleged that “on several occasions, we have to beg the mercy (of the CAR regional finance chief Beatrice Odsey) for the release of POs (purchase orders), which she withholds … and our papers are only released when she is promised a certain amount.”

Yodong said that Odsey demanded from her P30,000 as grease money to facilitate the payment of a contract to construct a fence and supply plastic bags. The same official had already been accused of purchasing farm machinery and banana and pineapple suckers in 1989 and 1990 without public bidding and paying suppliers even before deliveries were made.

Meanwhile, in the Western Visayas, DA Regional Director Arturo Pescayo has been in hot water for a “ghost” contract in which P1.2 million was disbursed to build cemented basketball courts used for drying grain, but which were never constructed.

Corrupt practices continue because of the collusion among the highest officials of regional units, making it difficult for the central office to track down the anomalies, admits former DA Secretary Salvador Escudero III. An examination of cases filed against RFUs in Central Luzon, the Cordillera, Central Mindanao, Western Visayas and the central office itself shows the connivance among ranking officials.   In all these cases, the evidence showed that the regional finance chief colluded with either or both the regional director and assistant regional director to divert funds and to cover up the tracks of their malfeasance.

To their credit, all DA secretaries have tried to rein in the abuses committed by regional units, but the anomalies persist. In 1997 and 1998, Escudero ordered the investigation of the operations of the DA’s field operations in Regions 3 (Central Luzon) and 12 (Central Mindanao). But just a few years before, his predecessor, Carlos Dominguez had already probed the operations of Region 12.

In 1990, then DA secretary Senen Bacani cracked the whip on Cordillera officials. But 10 years later, the problems there seemed to have remained unresolved, prompting the current DA secretary Edgardo Angara to relieve Cordillera regional director Faustino Maslan and suspend finance officer Odsey for their involvement in several anomalous transactions.

The burden of monitoring field operations lies on the DA central office in Quezon City. Usually, such monitoring is based on reports filed by the field units themselves or by people sent to the regions by the central office. This means that complaints from the field rarely get to the DA office in Quezon City.

“The beneficiary is unable to communicate his problems,” says Tolentino. “If he wants to file a complaint, he has to go to the municipal, provincial and regional, then national office, where his problem has to go through the assistant secretary, then the undersecretary and eventually to the secretary. By then, a year would already have passed.”

Tolentino, who was commissioned by the Asian Development Bank to study the agriculture bureaucracy, instead suggests “multiple layers of monitoring” to include NGOs, cooperatives, local officials and the DA’s clientele—farmers, fisherfolk and livestock raisers. He also advocates that other functions currently exercised by the central office, such as policy planning, monitoring and accountability, be taken over by the RFUs in coordination with local governments and communities.

With such reforms, the complaints of farmers like those in Sultan Kudarat might be heeded. “We got nothing from DA, not even seeds,” gripes a barangay captain in Isulan, the capital. “ The only time we got something from the DA was last year when they gave us rat poison.”

She complained that even at the height of El Niño in 1997, farmers in her village did not receive much needed seeds and water pumps, even if the DA had disbursed P1 billion for irrigation facilities, including dams and small irrigation pumps, and P173 million for seeds, fertilizer and pesticides.

Farmers in nearby Esperanza town said they did get seeds, but only in September 1998. “By then, El Niño was over,” says an officer of a local farmers’ group. “We just milled the seeds to get rice.” She also complained that the goats they received from a DA program in 1998 were all sickly.

Roger Chio, DA’s Regional Director for RFU 12, which has a jurisdiction over Sultan Kudarat, says that not all the farmers’ needs could be accommodated because of limited funds. There is no assured budget to purchase seeds, for example. He also advises farmers to reject low-quality inputs that they are given.

Just how prevalent corruption is at the DA is a matter of debate. In 1998, the Congressional Commission on Agricultural Modernization noted that while the DA has been occasionally figured in high-profile cases of graft, it has not been, as an institution, “the subject of research on graft and corruption, nor has it been singled out as an extremely graft-ridden department.” Escudero concedes that corrupt DA officials exist, but asserts that these are a minority.

But last year, Ombudsman Aniano Desierto, citing the number of cases filed from 1996 to 1999, included the DA among the top 10 graft-prone government agencies. During this period, he said, 64 DA-related graft cases were filed at the Ombudsman’s office. These cases involved high DA officials, among them a former secretary, undersecretary, and several heads of attached agencies, bureau chiefs and regional DA official.     

Similarly, a Sandiganbayan survey of cases filed against 24 agencies from 1990 to 1995 showed 483 cases involving P86. 3 million against DA officials or employees pending at the anti-graft court.

A former undersecretary who was at the DA for more than 10 years believes that while the money lost from “systemic” corruption at the DA may not be as big as that in other government agencies, “the persistence (of corrupt practices) and the (DA officials’) inability to act on them, definitely puts the DA in the (graft-prone) league.”

COA has made similar observations. The 1997 COA audit on “Gintong Ani,” Escudero’s banner program intended to provide farm inputs through soft loans, provided evidence of delayed/lack of funds, non-adherence to implementing guidelines and lack of coordination among the DA central office, the RFUs and local government units.

COA also pointed to several instances when the DA central office, some RFUs, attached agencies and bureaus undermined accounting rules by not submitting necessary papers like disbursement vouchers and contracts and paying ridiculous amounts for obviously overpriced items and services.  Such was the case of the RFU in the Eastern Visayas, which COA accused of “wasteful spending of government funds” because it purchased bangus fry overpriced by 45 percent.     

After Gintong Ani’s lackluster performance, the new DA secretary, William Dar, introduced a new farm productivity program called “Agrikulturang MakaMASA.”  In its 1998 report, the COA reported the same pattern of anomalies that befell previous DA programs: questionable emergency purchases, advance payment for supplies and negotiated procurement instead of public bidding. 

COA cited the case of the Western Visayas RFU, which awarded a P10-million contract for livestock purchase without a public bidding.  COA also found several instances of “irregular, unnecessary, excessive and extravagant expenditures.” The DA central office itself was guilty of this offense, according to COA, when it “unconscionably incurred the amount of P3.9 million for newspaper and magazine advertisements.”

The prevalence of corrupt practices is further attested to by complaints filed before the office of the Resident Ombudsman at the DA, where some 20 complaints have been lodged, including a charge that one Mindanao regional director used DA money to build a P100-million house.

Other complaints were filed against a regional director in a Luzon province whose favorite supplier is allegedly notorious for delivering bad seeds. RFU officials in another Luzon province were accused of giving farm loans to local officials instead of to farmers and fisherfolk.

Bienvenida Gruta, who became the DA’s Resident Ombudsman last November, says her office has received anonymous complaints against two RFUs in Mindanao, one RFU in Visayas and one Manila-based DA bureau, all of them involving either ghost or incomplete deliveries of farm machinery. Gruta intends to form a task force to probe these complaints.