THE Department of Agriculture (DA) is proposing to implement new cost benchmarks in budgeting for farm-to-market (FMR) roads, a Senator said during the DA’s budget deliberations.
“There’s going to be a recomputation of the cost,” Senator Francis Pancratius N. Pangilinan, said late Tuesday.
Mr. Pangilinan, who sponsored the DA’s budget in plenary, added that “there will be a menu and a range of costs per kilometer depending on terrain… elevation, location, and slope.”
Last month, the DA announced that it will take over the farm-to-market road program from the Department of Public Works and Highways, which is grappling with a broader corruption scandal in its infrastructure projects.
Transferring supervision of the FMR program to the DA expects to cut costs by at least 20% and accelerate construction. The DA hopes to construct about 131,000 kilometers of FMRs, with about 70,000 kilometers already built.
“Because of the flood control scandal, it was suggested and adopted by the DA, that the Farm-to-Market Road program will now be executed or implemented by the DA under the Bureau of Agriculture Fisheries Engineering (BAFE),” he added.
“Then this will be monitored more effectively,” he said.
The Senate Finance Committee has estimated that the government lost more than P10 billion due to the overpricing of FMRs in 2023 and 2024.
“The major considerations since coming up with the list of projects would be production area, number of farmers who will benefit, vulnerability of project site, current road condition, and connectivity linkages to the markets,” Mr. Pangilinan added.
The DA was allocated about P159.23 billion in the Senate’s version of the 2026 budget bill, against the P180.28 billion proposed in the House bill.