Philippines: Civil society serenades legislators, Seeks P20 billion budget increase for social expenditures

The bicameral committee starts its deliberation today to reconcile the versions of the House and Senate of the General Appropriations Act.

“Measures to reduce poverty may be dangerously sacrificed to achieve the government’s projection of achieving a balanced budget. We have seen in 2007 that a balanced budget can be attained not by improved tax revenue collection but by aggressive privatization of our country’s assets and under spending on social expenditures,” said Briones.

Around P7.6 B of the House of Representatives’ General Appropriations Bill (GAB) can be traced to the P20B ABI budget proposal for health, education, environment and agriculture.

“The amount is still very low and the Senate’s move to disregard the House version of the appropriations bill and revert back to the original proposal of the Executive was more unfortunate,” said Briones.

Social Watch earlier criticized the Senate’s P4B cut in the House-approved appropriation for health and the Senate’s allocation of P5 million for seedling banks to “reforest” the highways while disregarding the environment groups’ proposal to provide funding for community-based forestry program.

The group also proposed to scrap the subsidy allocation for hybrid rice amounting to P450 million and use this fund to support organic agriculture. The Senators questioned the cost-efficiency of the hybrid rice program at the height of the investigation of the agriculture fund scam during the deliberation of the 2007 agriculture budget. Former Senate President Franklin Drilon advised the agriculture department that 2007 should be the last year of subsidy for hybrid rice.

The civil society group urges the Senate to remove this subsidy and instead allocate P158 million for the promotion of organic farming to cash-strapped farmers who can not afford high cost of input in chemical farming.

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