Yap Orders Audit of DA Post Harvest Facilities

RICE HARVEST, photo above shows a farmer carrying a load full of newly cut rice stacks to his bamboo mat where he prepares it for threshing in Sigma, Capiz. Rice farmers in Capiz rely on their 3rd crop of the planting season where they could gain more income from the usual 2 crops planting season. (PINOY GONZALES/ PNS)

Secretary Arthur Yap of the Department of Agriculture (DA) has ordered an internal audit of all postharvest facilities put up by the various DA offices and attached-agencies in keeping with the sweeping reform program that the agency is implementing. This audit will ensure better monitoring of its inter-vention programs and more judicious disbursement of funds to local government units (LGUs), non-government organizations (NGOs) and people’s organizations (POs).

These postharvest facilities comprise flatbed dryers, tramlines, cold chain facilities, fish ports, shredders, slaughter houses, and bagsakan or drop-off centers. They are all meant to pare post-production losses that cut into the profits of farmers plus other stakeholders and spell the more efficient and cheaper delivery of goods from farms to markets.

Yap assigned Assistant Secretary Salvador Salacup to head the internal audit team that will start assessing and validating these postharvest projects following the Lenten break.

"The DA is conducting this internal audit of its postharvest facilities to spell greater transparency," Yap said. "This is in keeping with the reform measures that we have put in place for a better monitoring of our intervention programs meant to boost farm production and a more judicious downloading of public funds to farmer-beneficiaries via our program partners like LGUs, NGOs and POs," he added.

This DA reform program is the linchpin of government efforts to correct systemic lapses that have earlier affected the implementation of its food security and sufficiency initiatives.

Yap said such reforms are topped by the creation of national and regional monitoring teams to conduct "periodic field validation and rapid appraisal" of the DA’s intervention measures under its banner program Ginintuang Masaganang Ani (GMA), and the adoption of rigid guidelines on the release of funds to NGOs, POs, and LGUs.

For better coordination with the Commission on Audit (COA), the new guidelines issued by Yap last year already contained provisions of COA Circular No. 2007-001 on fund releases to NGOs and POs, and of COA Circular No. 94-013 on similar releases to LGUs. /MP