Joint audit by DA, DPWH of farm-to-market roads to begin 

The Departments of Agriculture and Public Works and Highways are starting this week their joint audit of farm-to-market roads by summoning three contractors involved in the unfinished FMRs in Davao. 

The DA regional field office flagged these projects that were supposed to be completed in 2021.

“One road was really nowhere to be found, while the other still had freshly poured cement,” said DA Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr.

The projects cost between P12 million and P15 million, with each FMR spanning at least one kilometer.

Laurel said the FMRs were critical in strengthening the value chain and improving farmers’ livelihoods.

“The farmers I’ve talked to during the inspection have underscored the importance of those FMR projects for their livelihood, especially in lowering the cost of production and increasing their income,” said Laurel.

Currently, some 70,000 km of the 131,000 km nationwide FMR requirement has been completed that linked farms directly to markets.

Laurel said the DA will summon both contractors and district engineers of the DPWH over unfinished FMR projects in the Davao Region.

Laurel inspected two of the three incomplete FMRs in the region as part of its ongoing nationwide audit.

“We will seek explanation from the DPWH district engineers assigned to that area from 2021 and 2022 in coordination with Secretary Vince Dizon and his new team, as to why the FMRs are either nonexistent or only now being completed,” he said.

Similarly, the Senate is also questioning the P8 billion jump in FMRs 2026 budget of the DPWH or from P16 billion to P32.6 billion, in the general appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives.

At the DPWH’s budget hearing, senators questioned the inclusion of P8 billion worth of FMRs in its proposed 2026 budget.

Finance committee chair Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian said the amount is not part of the agency’s master plan, warning that the funds could go unused or misaligned with actual agricultural needs.

The implementation of FMR projects has been transferred to the DA from the DPWH due to questions on the latter’s alleged anomalous implementation leading to “extreme overpricing.”

However, the issues raised during Monday’s hearing have yet to be dealt with by the DPWH when the FMR implementation was transferred to the DA.

“Because we saw in the GAB, there’s a bigger allocation for FMR. So the point is we’re cleaning up the DPWH, we’ve transferred to the DA any possible issue,” Gatchalian said.

Gatchalian urged DA officials to clarify whether the additional P16 billion was part of the Farm-to-Market Road Network Plan (FMRNP), the DA’s master list of validated and feasible road projects.

DA engineer Cristy Polido admitted that not all of the additional FMR projects were included in the network plan.

“They are yet to be validated. Some of which are included, some of which are yet to be validated and included in the FMRNP,” Polido said.

She said that out of the 1,656 FMRs worth P32 billion, those amounting to P24 billion had already been validated.

That leaves P8 billion in unvalidated projects, which Gatchalian warned could not be implemented under existing special provisions requiring clearance from the DA.

Gatchalian pointed out that this situation risks wasting P8 billion in public funds if the unvalidated projects remain outside the DA’s official network plan.

Polido said the DA would not implement these if they are not part of the FMNRP.

The DA has identified seven “ghost projects” in its ongoing review of unfinished or overpriced government contracts, with a combined reported value of P125 million.

The DA submitted its current findings to President Marcos in early October by Laurel, with most of the ghost projects in Mindanao. 

The projects include farm-to-market roads, valued at P15 million per kilometer.

But DA is still waiting for the results of its latest internal audit of FMRs, meaning they could uncover more “ghost projects.”