A Senate committee hearing meant to give farmers a rare platform before lawmakers was scrapped without warning after a leadership coup reshuffled committee chairmanships across the chamber.
The hearing, organized under the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Food and Agrarian Reform, had been scheduled to take up concerns about fertilizer prices, poor roads, absent cold storage facilities, unfair trader pricing, imported vegetables, climate change, El Niño, and transport costs. Chef and farmer advocate Waya Araos-Wijangco said representatives from several farming communities had come prepared to speak on all of it.
Some had rearranged their schedules during planting and harvest season, arranged childcare, found people to watch over their fields, bought bus tickets, and traveled to Manila. They were turned away on Monday afternoon — the same day the Senate ousted Sen. Tito Sotto III and installed Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano as Senate president, a move that declared all Senate posts vacant, including committee chairmanships.
With the chairmanship of the agriculture committee effectively suspended, the hearing could not proceed. Sen. Kiko Pangilinan, who had chaired the committee, apologized and attributed the cancellation directly to the reorganization.
Pangilinan described the disruption as a “temporary setback” and committed to continuing his advocacy for farmers and fisherfolk regardless of whether he retains the committee chair after the dust settles.
“Para sa mga magsasaka at mangingisda. Para sa bayan. Tuloy lang. Laban lang!” he said.
Cayetano, for his part, said committee hearings would go on — particularly those already underway before the leadership transition — and set May 18 as a target date for completing the reorganization of committees.
For the farmers who had already made the journey, the hearing’s collapse translated directly into lost time and lost income from a day away from their fields.
