Masagana 99

“Masagana” is a Filipino term for “bountiful”[1] while 99 refers to the number of sacks of rice yielded per hectare of land in every harvest season.[2]

Masagana 99 was conceived by the administration of then Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos[1] as way to cope with a nationwide rice shortage arising from the various natural disasters and pest inverstations in 1972.[3]

Launched on May 21, 1973, its goal was to promote Philippine rice self-sufficiency by raising the Philippines' average palay crop yield from 40 cavans per hectare to 99 cavans per hectare. The program planned to achieve this by pushing farmers to use newly-developed technologies including high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, low-cost fertilizer, and herbicides.[3]

The program included a supervised credit scheme, which was supposed to provide farmers with the funds needed to pay for the program's technology package. The Central Bank designed subsidized rediscounting facilities for public and private credit institutions throughout the country, encouraging them to give loans to farmers without collateral or other usual borrowing requirements.[3]

The program achieved initial success by encouraging farmers to plant new “Miracle Rice” (IR8) variety of rice which the International Rice Research Institute had been developing since 1962, during the administration of President Carlos P. Garcia.[4]

The program was launched at the time the country was experiencing a shortage of supply on rice and was credited for the launching of the Philippine Green Revolution in 1973 which allowed the country to export rice to other Asian countries.[2] The highlights of its short-lived success happened when the Philippines finally attained self-sufficiency in 1975-1976, and was able to export rice to its neighbors in Asia in 1977-1978. But costly subsidies and failure of many farmers-borrowers to repay the loans led to the program benefiting only 3.7% of the country's small rice farmers by 1980.[5]

Economists[6] generally acknowledge Masagana 99 to have failed because the supervised credit scheme it offered to farmers proved unsustainable.[6] The program is said to have catered to rich landowners and has been criticized for leaving poor farmers in debt[6] and for having become a vehicle of political patronage.[7]

Aside from the problems of its credit scheme, however, Masagana also had a negative impact on the environment and on traditional agricultural methods. Masagana 99’s package of technological interventions in the form of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals imported from other countries.[8] This resulted in the devastation of indigenous plants and animals, and the eradication of certain pest species only led to the dominance of other pests.[3]

For example, Masagana 99 was responsible for convincing the majority of the Philippines' irrigated rice farmers to adopt the use of chemical fertilizers.[9] It also led the Bureau of Plant Industry to focus on chemical fertilizers to eliminate pests such as the rice stemborer because pesticides were cheaper - abandoning a pre-existing Integrated Pest Management approach which used Trichogramma to control stemborer populations.[9]

National Scientist and former University of the Philippines President Emil Q. Javier notes that by 1980, "Masagana 99 ceased to be of consequence as only 3.7 percent of the small rice farmers were able to borrow."[5] By 1981, the program's problems were apparent enough that Southeast Asian news outlets noted that Masagana 99 and its aquaculture equivalent, Biyayang Dagat, were lacking in funds due to low loan repayment rates.[3] By 1984, the Marcos administration shifted its focus away from Masagana 99 and towards a new program, the Intensified Rice Production Program (IRPP), which like Masagana 99 succeeded in temporarily increasing rice production, but ultimately left its beneficiary-farmers in debt.[3]

According to Carlos Dominguez III who was the agriculture secretary under the administration of President Corazon Aquino, the successor of Marcos, from 1987 to 1989, the program caused about 800 rural banks to go bankrupt, never boosted rice production sufficiently for the country to be able to export rice,[10] and left poor farmers in debt, because the program was used as a vehicle of political patronage.

President Rodrigo Duterte expressed his interest to revive the program on October 2016.[2] The plan met opposition from MASIPAG, a group of farmers and scientists, saying that revival of the program will bring back issues such as debt, replacement of traditional varieties with newer ones, and the promotion of pesticide use which they say will harm animals, farmers and crops and insisted that only large firms benefited from the program. The Department of Agriculture notes that the old variety used in the Masagana 99 program is already phaseout and the Masagana 99 can use newer varieties of rice and insists that environmentally friendly pesticides will be promoted under the potentially revived Masagana 99.[1]