AGRICULTURE Secretary Francisco P. Tiu Laurel Jr. is urging farmers, local governments, and ordinary citizens to help monitor the construction of farm-to-market roads (FMRs), warning that inefficiencies and corruption in rural infrastructure continue to undermine food production and farmer incomes.
The Department of Agriculture (DA), in order to tighten oversight, is preparing to launch an “FMR Watch” platform where the public can upload photos, report progress, and flag issues directly from construction sites.
“We will do a number of things like the FMR Watch website, wherein our netizens or ordinary citizens or local government officials could help monitoring projects and upload photos into that website so we at the DA could track their progress, or lack thereof,” Tiu Laurel said. “We will also build a portal where they can see the exact location of the road projects so they could easily go there and inspect the FMR.”
He emphasized that broad participation is essential to prevent abuses. “We need everyone’s help to monitor all of these FMR projects in order to do them properly at the fastest possible time. These initiatives, we believe, will greatly help in keeping everyone honest and ensure precious public funds do not end up in some unscrupulous individual’s pockets.”
Beginning in 2026, the responsibility for developing FMRs will shift back to the DA from the Department of Public Works and Highways, which is now grappling with corruption allegations involving hundreds of billions of pesos in substandard, incomplete, or non-existent flood-control projects.
The DA estimates the country needs around 131,000 kilometers of FMRs, but more than 60,000 kilometers remain unbuilt—a backlog that, at current funding levels, could take decades and multiple administrations to finish. The agency is conducting an audit of some 5,000 kilometers of FMRs completed in recent years to verify whether they meet technical specifications and were finished as planned.
To strengthen transparency, the DA has submitted to the Senate a detailed list of FMR projects, complete with map coordinates, for inclusion in the 2026 General Appropriations Act.
Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, praised the submission, saying its inclusion in the budget law should be “the standard” to uphold transparency. “This is a testament that we can do a better job in promoting transparency by detailing the projects listed within the General Appropriations Act,” he said.
The Senate has approved the DA’s proposed P184.1-billion budget for 2026, mirroring the appropriation earlier passed by the House of Representatives.
