The 355 farm-to-market roads (FMRs) that the House of Representatives added to the proposed 2027 budget are no closer to resorts than the farmland around them, based on the coordinates printed in the budget itself. We also found no mapped resort that lacks another road and would depend on one of them for access. The data cannot rule out every case, but they show no clear sign that the roads were meant for resorts.
The question
Kenneth Abante of the People’s Budget Coalition raised the issue at the Senate hearing on the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) 2027 budget. The hearing was held on October 21, 2026, according to news reports.
“Ang house po nag-insert ng 355 na totally new projects worth nearly 6 billion pesos for farm-to-market roads, na totally wala sa National Expenditure Program at proposal ng DA. Ito po ay yung mga tig-5 million, 10 million, 15 million na mga kalsada. Hindi po tayo sigurado kung konektado ito talaga sa National Highway Network o konektado ito sa mga resort nila,” Abante said.
His count matches the budget documents. We added up the 355 FMR lines in House Bill 10858 that have no exact match in the President’s National Expenditure Program (NEP), and they total ₱5,969,005,000. Not all of them are new roads: 186 of the 355 project titles are for concreting, rehabilitation or improvement.
How we checked
Each FMR in the budget comes with coordinates, usually the start and end points of the project. We drew each road as a straight line between those points and compared it with 5,090 places listed as resorts on OpenStreetMap. Of these, 1,545 are counted because “resort” is in their name, even if they are tagged as hotels, guest houses or water parks.
Slightly more often near a resort
Of the 353 House-added roads with readable coordinates, 37 (10.5%) are less than 1 km from a mapped resort. Among the 704 FMRs in the NEP, it is 48 (6.8%).
That gap is small and fragile. A standard statistical test gives p = 0.04, which is borderline. Two of the 37 rows, both in Rosario, La Union, print the same coordinates; counting them once gives p = 0.07. Setting aside obviously misprinted long lines in both lists gives 0.06 to 0.10.
The same rule applies to every road in both lists, including misprints: one FMR in Miagao, Iloilo is printed as a 95 km line that starts in Bacolod.
But location matters
Some provinces simply have more resorts and more farms. So we moved each road, in the same shape and length, onto farmland points 2 to 15 km around it, using the European Space Agency’s WorldCover 2021 cropland map, and counted how many copies landed near a resort.
Take the Brgy. Liwayway FMR in Diffun, Quirino (₱5 million). The real road is 13.6 km from the nearest mapped resort. Of its 20 copies on nearby farmland, 2 landed within 1 km of one.
Across the 345 House-added roads that have farmland copies, about 35.1 were expected to be near a resort. We found 35. In other words, the House-added roads are only as close to resorts as the farmland in their own area.
For the NEP, the same test on 680 roads expected 60.0 and found 46. NEP roads sit farther from resorts than their farmland would predict. So location explains only part of the gap between the two lists, and once location is taken into account, there is no clear difference between them.
Note: this test uses a different base than the map above (345 and 680 roads instead of 353 and 704), because some roads, including 8 House-added ones, have no farmland within 2 to 15 km.
Does any resort need these roads?
We also looked for resorts with no road yet, where an FMR would become the way in. There are 127 mapped resorts less than 1 km from any road on either list. Of these, 125 already have another road within 150 meters on OpenStreetMap. The other 2 are more than 700 meters from the nearest FMR. We found no resort of this kind.
Eleven of the 127 are counted only because of the misprinted Miagao line.
Using Google Open Buildings, we also looked for roads within 1 km of a resort that pass through areas with very few buildings. They were rare in both lists: 2 of 353 House-added roads and 3 of 704 NEP roads.
What the data can’t show
OpenStreetMap does not list every resort, and the coordinates are usually just the start and end of each project. The test also does not cover an FMR that would pave a resort’s existing road. And the budget does not say who asked for each road: the FMR annexes list only the project name and amount.
We do not know who owns the resorts on the map, and we are not linking them to any lawmaker.
Taken together, this data shows no clear sign that the roads added by the House are meant for resorts.
What you can do
The 2027 roads are still proposals. Once they are funded, the public can follow the projects on the DA’s FMR Watch portal, which lets users track projects from proposal to completion and sends public comments for verification and action.
Mga Resibo (Sources)
- House of Representatives, House Bill No. 10858 (General Appropriations Bill, FY 2027), Volume I-B, FMR annex, pp. 651 to 710 (Liwayway line on p. 664; Miagao line on p. 693).
- Department of Budget and Management, National Expenditure Program FY 2027, Volume I, FMR schedule, pp. 1511 to 1557.
- DPWH-NEP-HB-2027-ANALYSIS (commit c86a509), the public dataset of FMR lines and their match between the House bill and the NEP.
- Senate of the Philippines, video of the Senate finance committee hearing on the DA 2027 budget (Kenneth Abante’s remarks).
- Department of Agriculture, “DA places FMR projects under public microscope,” on the FMR Watch portal.
- © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), resort and road data downloaded November 5, 2026 (UTC).
- © ESA WorldCover project 2021 / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium.
- Google Open Buildings v3 (building footprints, confidence 0.75 and above).
From news reports: Rappler (October 23, 2026), identifying Abante as co-convenor of the People’s Budget Coalition; Daily Tribune, for the October 21, 2026 hearing date. Also on FMR Watch: PTV News.
All counts, distances and comparisons are Pinoytrend.net’s own analysis, using the same rules for every road in both lists.