We measure the success of agriculture programs by the increase in farm output, the increase in income of the farmers, and by the improvement in their well-being.
It is now more than 70 years since independence and we still find our people in the rural areas very poor. This is the main reason why they want to go to the cities or abroad, if given the chance.
Right now, 23 percent of our workforce are still employed in agriculture but they account only for eight percent of our total output or gross domestic product.
Industry only employs nineteen percent of our workforce, yet it accounts for 34 percent of our output.
The rest of our workforce, 58 percent, are employed in services that accounts also for no more than 58 percent of our output.
From this information, we find that if an average Filipino worker produces one unit of our total output, an agriculture worker will produce only a third of that unit.
On the other hand, an industry worker produces two units and a service worker just one.
Low productivity explains why people engaged in agriculture are very poor.
Why is our productivity in our agriculture low?
What rural development programs did we implement in the past to develop our agriculture?
Did they not raise our agriculture productivity?
Why did they fail?
Was it due to poor design of the programs we implemented?
Or was it because of failure of our program managers to do their tasks?
Perhaps both.
Good governance requires that we not only monitor the progress of the program we implement in terms of inputs used and outputs produced on a regular basis but also measure the success of our programs in meeting their objectives after some time have elapsed.
To be frank, we really do not know if we are doing well with program implementation monitoring.
Our bonus system in government is given based on the individual accomplishments of the each worker.
Supposedly, one receives the bonus if his performance is at least satisfactory.
Does satisfactory, very satisfactory, or excellent performance of the workers translates into the successful performance of the programs in meeting their objectives?
Who knows?
We do not measure the success of the our agriculture programs by the number of farm visits we made, trainings and seminars we conducted, number of participants who attended, let alone the savings we generate from the programs to allow the government agencies to give additional bonus to their employees.
We measure the success of an agriculture programs by the increase in total farm output, the increase in income of the farmers, and by the overall improvement in their well-being.
That we find our farming population still destitute after many years under many presidents from independence up to now means that we failed in our agriculture development programs.
That, of course, is obvious, and why we find many of our rural folks still poor and wanting to migrate to cities if given the chance only to become urban poor.
What is not obvious is why we failed.
Again, was it because of design failure or management failure?
Were their completion and impact studies on these programs?
Perhaps there were but how extensive and how good were these studies?
Were these studies even used in support of the national government budget given to each agency of the government concerned with agriculture?
That we do not know.
We hear of the budget only during the budget hearing in congress and senate when reported in the papers.
In fact, they are scarcely reported, and mostly only when the legislators ask why the budget for their respective areas or favorite program is not found or too small.
Or when they hate the secretary for not attending the budget hearing.
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