“Being a highly archipelagic country, government must begin plotting a development trajectory that best and most sustainably anchor our national future on a robust and resilient ‘blue economy’.”
Just recently, a webinar was held discussing the proposed 2021 budgets of the Departments of Agriculture and of Environment and Natural Resources. It was jointly conducted by Rappler and the Institute of Leadership and Democracy, or ILEAD.
DA and DENR are our lead agencies that are mandated to secure our food supply and the quality of our environmental assets to support and sustain food production. These assets include watersheds, water bodies, soils, and biodiversity. Biodiversity are the sum total of our genetic treasury from which we derive the variety of life forms that we use for food, food components, fiber, feeds and pharmaceuticals.
Their proposed 2021 budgets indicate a continuing (even worsening) story of what I see is an “ecological irrationality” of our budgetary priorities.
First, the facts:
1. We are an archipelagic country; a country with more water than land. We have seven times more water surfaces (220 metric has.) than land surfaces (29.8 metric has., with 1.2 metric has. of rivers, lakes, and marshes). We are not continental like Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, the United States or China.
2. Our seas, oceans and inland waters hold more resources than are found in our lands. We get from our aquatic ecosystems things that could be eaten, water, medicines, oil, gas and minerals. They support life on our planet through nutrient cycling, primary production, habitats for species and generating genetic diversity. They regulate earth processes like climate regulation, carbon sequestration, shoreline protection and water purification.
They give us spaces for cultural expressions (for recreation, education, spiritual fulfilment and aesthetic experiences). We do many things with our waters: shipping, tourism, defense and energy development. A recent estimate puts the GVA, or Gross Value Added, of the aquatic sector of our economy at about P450 billion in 2012, P500 billion in 2014, P566 billion in 2016 and P561.5 billion in 2018 (Ebarvia, Ma. Corazon. 2020. “Blue Economy: Shaping the Future through Sustainability, Innovations and Governance”).
3. We have more diversity of life forms and ecological formations in our waters than in our lands. These are important to our ability to produce biological materials for our sustenance and health. In fact, we’re the global center of marine biodiversity.
We have more marine species in our country than in any other place in the planet (Garry, H. in https://earth.org/marine-biodiversity-in-the-philippines-faces-decimation/). If properly managed and sustained, they are vast sources of genetic treasures to backstop our domestic food industry.
4. Our population continues to grow (1.4 percent in 2018). And humans are land-domiciling creatures. As our numbers grow, we’ll increasingly need more land spaces for housing, roads, airports, schools, offices, hospitals, churches, malls and other infrastructure required by modern society. As we build more of these, the land area for food production, forests and watersheds would eventually shrink.
Evidence? Look at the wide rice fields in Cavite and Laguna along the South Super Highway. Or in Central Luzon. Or the forests in the Sierra Madre and in Mindanao, Samar, Mindoro, Panay, Leyte and Negros. How much are left?
Now, here’s what I think seems to be the “ecological irrationality” of the DA and DENR budgets:
In the light of the four facts above, their budgets heavily lean toward supporting mostly food production and building up environmental assets in our lands. Yes, there are good reasons for this. But they give minuscule budgetary commitments to what we could have from our vaster seas, oceans and freshwater ecosystems.
How might their focus on land eventually square up with our increasing expansion of infrastructure for our rapidly ballooning population (In my view, it is our need for land – not food production which could be expanded in aquatic systems – that is prone to the risk of a “Malthusian trap” when population and human infrastructure eat up areas that we need for producing foods and environmental capital)?
Why not have a budgetary profile that slowly shifts the nexus of our food production toward what our larger seas and waters could give us and the nexus of our environmental resilience building efforts toward where it is least threatened by human conversion (like in steep hills, deep gullies and wetlands)? And why not start focusing our attention on building up environmental capital where they could increase the resilience of our aquatic production systems?
In fact, assuming that our population will continue to grow, I see it as a good “future proofing” strategy to now begin investing on aquatic sources of our sustenance and on alternative areas for forests and terrestrial biodiversity, to where they would be least prone to being later wiped out by subdivisions, factories and highways.
Of course, doing this – to start “going blue” – would require substantial investments in research and development. This is precisely why we need more budgetary allotments toward these.
But look what we have in the “budget stories” of DA and DENR.
Table 1 shows the budgets of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) and of the other fisheries-related DA attached offices. These are shown in relation to the DA’s actual budget disbursements from 2016 to 2020. It also shows what’s the budgets proposed for 2021.
(I use DA’s actual disbursements because this is what’s actually expended out of its annual budgets. It’s actual expenditures have been consistently lower than budgeted, averaging only 80.9% of its budgets in 2013-2020 because of persistent problems of the agency’s “absorptive capacity” [See Table 1]. Comparing the budgets of BFAR and the other fisheries-related offices against the total DA disbursements would be more generous than if I use their respective actual disbursements, which could not exceed their budgets.)
Table 1. DA budgets and disbursements (in billion pesos) and % efficiency of disbursement, 2013-2020
BFAR’s budgets in 2016 to 2020 have been averaging 15.4% of DA’s annual disbursements. In 2021, BFAR’s budget s even reduced from 6.1 B pesos in 2020 to only 4.4 B in 2021. The total budgets for both BFAR and other fisheries-related offices in the DA averages only 16.3% of annual DA disbursements in the same period.
Table 2. BFAR budget as % of total DA disbursements, 2013-2021 (in million pesos)
How do these numbers and budgetary commitments square with our having seven (7) times more water than land?
Here’s the DENR budget story for 2016 to 2021. The column charts below do not clearly show details (I apologize) but it shows the DENR’s budget commitments for its programs in the same period. It shows the intended budgets of these programs for 2021 (the last column in each cluster of columns).
Forests and Watersheds (FW, the second from the right cluster) are showing much higher allocations than the others, hovering around an average of about 8 B pesos a year in 2016 to 2021. Its next highest budget is for Natural Resource Enforcement and Regulations (NRER) at an annual average of about 4.5 B. Its budget for Coastal and Marine Programs (CMPs) is averaging just about half a billion a year.
What’re these saying? Assuming we gain more forests and watersheds because DENR’s putting a lot of its budget on them, has someone done the math to find out how long they’re likely to remain in place as we build more subdivisions and malls in the years to come?
Why all these budgets for land-based food security and environmental assets when we also have a much larger resource base in our coastal seas, deep oceans, and water bodies?
My point is not that we’ll abandon land-based food production – far from it – but to begin expanding our budget investments on developing the food complements we could derive from our seas – in such safe and sustainable ways – so that we ease the tightening land constraints to our food security.
Nor is my point about abandoning efforts to secure our terrestrial environmental assets, but to begin investing on where such assets would be least likely to be wiped out by population pressures. We may focus on investing in our coastal areas (mangroves) and use less expensive natural regeneration techniques to recover forests in hilly lands and gullies, rather than splurge on the more expensive “greening program” as has been done in the last few years.
My point is this: being a highly archipelagic country, government must begin plotting a development trajectory that best and most sustainably anchor our national future on a robust and resilient “blue economy”.
A “blue economy” is defined in the 2012 Changwon Declaration as “a practical ocean-based economic model using green infrastructure and technologies, innovative financing mechanisms, and proactive institutional arrangements for meeting the twin goals of protecting our oceans and coasts and enhancing its potential contributions to sustainable development, including improving human well-being, and reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities.” I see this to include wetlands, of which the Philippines has wide areas of them across the country.
We could begin by committing substantial budgets for protecting what we have in our seas and waters, for biomass accumulation in our blue environment, and for improving the management of our aquatic ecosystems. And, too, for accumulating environmental assets where they would be least at risk of land conversion and most supportive of improving the robustness and resilience of our aquatic systems.
My final take: This can be done … if only government begins reshaping budgets that would improve the protection and sustainability of our “blue environment”, future-proofing our people with a robust and resilient “blue economy”, and start redirecting our national development pathways toward achieving for our archipelagic country a “bluer future”. – NWI
