00:01The Department of Agriculture defends house lawmakers' insertions for farm-to-market roads, denying an NGO's claims they were made
00:08up.
00:08DA spokesman Arnel De Mesa says the items came from a validated master list put together by the agency itself.
00:15De Mesa says lawmakers could have taken projects from the DA's early budget proposal submitted to the Department of Budget
00:21and Management or from the master list of the Farm-to-Market Network plan.
00:25He, however, admits lawmakers' staff members may have made mistakes in copy-pasting the project's details into the budget proposal.
00:32The People's Budget Coalition earlier flagged hundreds of insertions in the House of Representatives' version of the 2027 proposed national
00:39budget.
00:40The group says 15 billion pesos worth of projects lack publicly available supporting documents.
00:45It said some coordinates listed in the proposal pointed to locations at sea.
00:49De Mesa says DA officials recently met with the PBC and explained that the discrepancies resulted from, quote, human error.
