THE Department of Agriculture (DA) on Thursday assured the public that its farm-to-market road (FMR) projects this year are without anomalies and “properly costed.” Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. made the assurance in reaction to the People’s Budget Coalition who claimed that more than 800 of the agency’s FMR projects were either overpriced or lacked specifications. In a briefing in Malacañang, Tiu Laurel said the DA’s FMR projects, meant to drastically lower the cost of bringing agricultural goods from the sources to the markets, went through proper vetting and plan-ning. “I can guarantee that whoever said back then that these [FMRs] were properly costed. I now have a new costing; I have consulted the private sector on this, and we will have a meeting with the most reputable construction companies by next week. We will present our figures to them, right, and of course, everybody can comment,” Tiu Laurel said. He also brushed off comparisons to the flood control projects of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), saying that the FMRs, while lower in cost, would be up to standards. The Senate had called out the DA for its past questionable FMRs which supposedly cost the govern-ment more than P10 billion. Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian flagged the “extremely overpriced” farm-to-market roads initiated by the DA in its 2023 and 2024 budgets, saying that many FMRs cost P30,000 per meter, or twice that of the P15,000 benchmark originally set by the DPWH. Tiu Laurel assured the public that this year’s FMR projects will be subject to proper costing, moving away from the uniform costing practices used in previous administrations. “The initial figure that we will be presenting to the construction companies, including VAT (value-added tax), VAT inclusive, is at P14.5 million per kilometer. That’s with VAT, with the canal included. The previous costing of the DPWH, not now of course, was P18 million,” Tiu Laurel said. He noted that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. directed to ensure the timely and transparent imple-mentation of the FMR program. “First of all, my name and the name of our President are at stake here, and our President has a very clear directive for all of us: ‘Keep it clean, do it fast,’” Tiu Laurel said. In the 2026 General Appropriations Act, the DA was allocated P297.102 billion, P33 billion of which is to be spent on FMR projects.