By DAVE SUAN ALBARADO

Cong. Atty. Arthur Yap of Murang Kuryente Partylist has called for leverage-based financing, smarter aid delivery, and agricultural safeguards as war-driven fuel prices push the Philippines toward a food security reckoning.

A veteran congressman and former agriculture secretary warned Thursday that the country’s deepening fuel crisis demands structural and market-driven solutions rather than government spending, cautioning that no amount of public money is sufficient to absorb the economic shockwaves unleashed by the Middle East war.

“Millions of Filipinos are suffering,” Yap acknowledged during an interview with Ardy Araneta Batoy of DYTR, “but there is simply no bank account big enough to draw from. That is the hard truth.”

Yap, also an economist, painted a sobering picture of an economy already under serious strain.

Fuel prices, he said, have roughly doubled since the outbreak of armed conflict in the Middle East, making affordable power virtually impossible across all sectors.

The cascade effects have spread quickly.

Fertilizer — a petroleum derivative — has surged 65 percent in cost, striking directly at the foundation of the country’s food supply.

The impact on Philippine agriculture, he said, is not theoretical.

Across approximately two million hectares of farmland per planting season, production costs have risen between 30 and 40 percent.

Farmers, rational actors under economic pressure, are responding predictably: planting with fewer inputs, stretching resources thin, and in some cases reducing application to as little as half the pre-war levels.

“The natural reaction of a farmer under financial stress is to plant with whatever is available,” said Yap, who served as Secretary of Agriculture before entering Congress. “But whatever is available is not enough.”

The downstream arithmetic is alarming.

Yap projected that the Philippines’ typical annual rice harvest — which normally runs between 19 and 20 million metric tons — could fall to 18 million metric tons or lower by the final quarter of 2026. If that shortfall materializes, the country will face the politically and economically costly prospect of ramping up rice imports to shore up domestic supply — a scenario Yap described as “a huge problem right now.”

WAY OUT

Asked whether the national government could finance direct assistance to struggling farmers, Yap was blunt: the money does not exist at the scale required.

Even the Agricultural Credit Policy Council — one of the better-capitalized bodies under the Department of Agriculture, with funds ranging from 500 million to one billion pesos — falls woefully short of what is needed for a nationwide agricultural intervention.

His solution is not more spending, but smarter leverage.

Yap proposed the creation of an emergency guarantee fund, deploying the council’s capital in partnership with the Philippine Guarantee Corporation, the Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation, and allied agencies.

The logic is straightforward: a direct lending pool of one billion pesos benefits a limited number of borrowers.

But structured as a guarantee fund — the way banks operate — the same billion pesos can be leveraged to unlock five to seven billion pesos in lending.

He pointed to PhilGuarantee, which operates under the Department of Finance with a capital base of 25 billion pesos yet supports 250 billion pesos in financing, as a living proof of the model’s viability.

“Use the leverage,” he urged. “Relying on budget appropriations alone will never be enough.”

MAHARLIKA FUND

In a more ambitious proposal, Yap called on the Maharlika Investment Fund — the Philippines’ state sovereign wealth fund — to pivot from passive capital deployment to active guarantee financing.

Rather than disbursing direct aid or subsidies, which he regarded as fiscally unsustainable, he argued the MIF should backstop bank lending to farmers and small enterprises, giving financial institutions the confidence to extend credit to borrowers they would otherwise turn away.

The same mechanism, he suggested, should be replicated by the Department of Trade and Industry through a dedicated guarantee facility for micro, small and medium enterprises, which account for roughly 98 percent of all Philippine companies and employ between 40 and 50 percent of the workforce.

The single largest problem facing these businesses, he said, is cash flow — and the most immediate relief available would be allowing them to defer tax payments during the crisis.

The Department of Finance, however, showed little appetite for that proposal.

The executive branch has instead pointed to the Bureau of Internal Revenue’s extension of income tax return filings by one month — a measure Yap considered insufficient given the depth and expected duration of the crisis.

Yap also expressed frustration over the handling of emergency powers to suspend fuel excise taxes.

While the executive branch secured authority to act, it elected to apply the suspension only to liquefied petroleum gas and kerosene, leaving excise taxes on other fuel products intact.

Under existing law, excise tax is levied per liter of fuel and value-added tax is applied on the product’s value.

“If you have emergency powers, use them fully,” Yap implied, stopping short of an outright rebuke of the administration but making clear he regarded the partial application as a squandered opportunity.

He was equally measured on the question of when relief will be felt.

Even if hostilities in the Middle East were to end today, he noted, the economic aftereffects will persist for at least six months — perhaps longer.

The supply chains disrupted by the war will take time to normalize, price pressures will ease slowly, and the damage already done to agricultural cycles will not reverse overnight.

There is, he said, an obligation to support those who are struggling during this interval — but he was careful to add that taxes must ultimately be settled.

The support he envisions is deferral, not forgiveness.

Aid through electricity bills

On the question of direct assistance to ordinary households, Yap offered an elegant, if unconventional, proposal: route government aid through electricity billing rather than through the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s existing ayuda distribution channels.

His reasoning exposed a structural blind spot in the government’s current welfare architecture.

Of the approximately 25 million Filipino families who pay electric bills, the households consuming between 51 and 300 kilowatt-hours per month — a range that covers the vast middle of the income spectrum — are routinely excluded from government aid because they are considered gainfully employed.

Yet these are precisely the families being squeezed hardest by the fuel crisis: earning just enough to be disqualified from welfare, but not enough to absorb a 65 percent fertilizer price spike or doubled power costs.

The government’s current system, Yap argued, is failing them.

Families consuming 50 kilowatt-hours or below already benefit from a subsidized lifeline rate and pay nothing.

Families consuming far above 300 kilowatt-hours can absorb the costs themselves. It is the working middle — the families spending 2,000 to 3,000 pesos a month on electricity — who need targeted relief and are being left out.

“Coursing aid through the electric bill removes the stigma of begging,” he said, echoing the sentiment of Representative Eli San Fernando of Kamangagawa Party-List, whom Yap praised for distinguishing between asking for alms and asking for structural support.

“Workers are not mendicants. They are asking for a system that recognizes their burden.”

The remark carried a deeper philosophical weight.

Cong. Atty. Art Yap invoked the late Senator Jose Diokno’s warning against the Philippines becoming a “mendicant society” — one that has drifted dangerously close to reliance on perpetual aid — and called for a framework that enables, rather than merely subsidizes.

He also cited the proposed Kalinga Act, a legislative measure currently in draft form that lawmakers described as the crisis-era successor to the Bayanihan Heal As One Acts passed during the pandemic.

Each legislator, Yap noted, is actively pitching provisions to be included.

ACTIVE LEGISLATOR

Throughout the interview, Yap offered a pointed, if restrained, critique of legislative disengagement.

As vice chairperson of the House Committee on Energy — and the panel’s designated representative at interagency hearings, a role conferred upon him by committee chairman Representative Pepito Alvarez — Yap has been spending much of the congressional recess in research mode rather than at rest.

Speaker Faustino Dy III has been convening hearings at which officials from the Office of the President and various executive agencies brief lawmakers on actions taken and budget requirements.

In that environment, Yap said, showing up without preparation is worse than not showing up at all.

“You carry the name of the committee when you walk into that room,” he said. “If you haven’t done the work, you have no business being there.”

Asked about colleagues who have remained conspicuously quiet amid the crisis, Yap declined to name names but acknowledged the reality plainly: Congress cannot compel members to speak.

Turning to his home province, Yap raised concerns about the competitive position of Bohol’s tourism industry.

The Loboc River Cruise — one of Bohol’s most iconic attractions — has recently raised its fees to P1,200 pesos, a move Yap said he found difficult to comment on directly but that prompted a reflection on the province’s tourism strategy.

“Bohol has brilliant natural endowments,” he said, “but brilliance alone does not win the market.”

He warned that domestic and international tourists have growing alternatives — not just within the Philippines, but across Southeast Asia — where the combination of competitive pricing and strong hospitality increasingly tips the scale.

The economics of travel, he noted, have blurred the line between domestic and international tourism.

Airfare to destinations like Vietnam and Thailand is now often comparable to the cost of flying to a domestic destination, making the Philippines’ value proposition less obvious than it once was.

His prescription for Bohol: invest in food quality, reassess fee structures, and deliver experiences that are genuinely unique and memorable — not merely scenic.

Overpricing, he cautioned, risks driving visitors away in a market where they have options.

Yap’s personal connection to Bohol surfaced repeatedly throughout the interview, carrying an undercurrent of nostalgia and unresolved political ambition.

He lost his bid for re-election as governor in 2022 but rejected any suggestion that defeat had severed his bond with the province.

“When I took my oath as Murang Kuryente representative,” he said, “I made sure to mention that I come from Loboc. That is who I am.”

He spoke warmly of Boholanos who he believes still support him — “they are just quiet,” he said — and declined to rule out a political comeback, though he stopped well short of declaring one.

He said he includes Bohol in his prayers and hopes Boholanos include him in theirs.

LEGAL CHALLENGE

The interview also addressed a legal challenge that had shadowed Yap’s return to national office.

A complainant had filed a disqualification case before the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal, citing an Ombudsman ruling that imposed an administrative penalty of perpetual disqualification from public office stemming from the procurement of a sound system worth P700,000 pesos for a hybrid tourism event in Panglao during the pandemic.

The Ombudsman, Yap explained, found the procurement process questionable — though it acknowledged no evidence of overpricing and confirmed the event had taken place.

The ruling carried both an administrative finding and a criminal component.

Yap and his co-respondents appealed on both fronts, and — crucially, in his view — they returned the full P700,000 pesos to government coffers.

The complainant, a person from Oslob, Cebu, has since withdrawn the HRET case.

Yap’s lawyers had characterized it as a nuisance suit.

Yap, however, has pieced together circumstantial links connecting the Cebu complainant to relatives in Dauis, Bohol, one of whom he described as a barangay politician with media connections — and from there, to what he believes is a politically motivated figure in Bohol who once benefited from his assistance.

He declined to name the person, expressing sadness rather than anger.

“Life is too short to make enemies,” he said. “I don’t know why this person has a grudge. But I would rather cooperate than divide.”

On the legal mechanics, Yap argued that as long as the criminal component of the Ombudsman case remains under appeal, the administrative penalty cannot be executed — a position he said is supported by applicable jurisprudence.

A son’s vigil

The interview closed on a deeply personal note.

Yap, whose public life has long been defined by the weight of office, spoke of the deliberate choice he has made to spend more time with his 92-year-old father, Domingo.

The elder Yap, he said, suffered a mild stroke but is recovering well.

Father and son are often seen travelling together on holidays, their outings documented in the photographs and videos the congressman shares on social media — images that read less as political image management than as the deliberate record of a man who does not want to look back with regret.

“When I was governor during the pandemic, I left my family in Manila,” Yap said quietly. “I left my father, my wife, my children. I chose duty then. Now I choose to be present.”

His father, he noted, skips meals when his son is absent.

“I do not want to wait until it is too late,” he said.