The corn is not the villain

Before anyone in Iloilo starts blaming farmers for the floods in Batad, sit with one number: PHP 14.83. That was the average farmgate price of a kilo of corn in mid-2025, per the Philippine Statistics Authority. Now ask what you would plant on a hillside if that kilo was the difference between tuition paid and tuition postponed. Trees take ten years. Corn takes four months. The math is not complicated, and the people doing it are not fools.

That is the uncomfortable place any honest conversation about Batad has to start. Our own reporting found that the town lost 80 percent of its forest cover in two decades, much of it converted to glyphosate-tolerant yellow corn – some of it inside a 347-hectare Community-Based Forest Management Agreement (CBFMA) in Alapasco, land the state set aside precisely to be rehabilitated, not stripped. Downstream, the bill has already come due. Eight people died in Pasayan when Typhoon Ursula sent floodwaters down those bare slopes on Christmas Day 2019. In Bulak Sur, families still cross a swollen stream by holding on to one another. They have asked for a footbridge. They are still waiting.

So yes, there is a reckoning owed here, but not mainly from the tillers. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources issued those stewardship contracts and was supposed to monitor them; instead, its own National Greening Program in Batad was quietly discontinued in 2022 after herbicide spraying killed the seedlings. The CBFMA holder has not answered questions. And one-third of Batad sits in flood-prone territory, yet the town has not seen a flood control project since 2018 – this in a country that, we now know, poured billions into flood control projects that were ghosts. The failure is layered, and it is institutional.

The Institute of Contemporary Economics, in its recent proposal to Gov. Arthur Defensor Jr., put it plainly: high production does not automatically mean people are better off. Iloilo harvested more than 104,000 metric tons of yellow corn in 2025. The feed mills and consolidators captured much of that value. The flood risk stayed in Batad. That is not a market working; that is a cost being quietly handed to a fifth-class municipality.

What now? The ICE proposal – map the corn areas against slopes and forestland, audit the tenure agreements, trace who actually profits along the value chain – is reasonable and, frankly, overdue. The province should adopt it with a deadline attached, because Defensor’s own Tanum Iloilo program promises to nearly triple forest cover by 2044, and Batad is where that promise either means something or does not.

But none of it will hold unless farmers are offered a livelihood ladder, not a lecture. Agroforestry support, guaranteed markets for intercropped goods, real financing – the works. There are 1.4 million corn farmers in this country making the same hillside calculation every season.

And build the Bulak Sur footbridge. This year. It is the cheapest promise on the table, and the one people will remember.