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JOBLESS
growth remains a major concern, with government efforts
misplaced or inadequate to significantly improve
productivity in agriculture, which employs a third of
the country’s workforce, a noted economist said on
Friday.
“[Economic] growth is not rooted in sectors where there
is proliferation of labor . . . The economy is growing
but the ability to expand employment considerably is
weak,” commented Arsenio M. Balisacan, who is also
director of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for
Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (Searca).
Government’s current penchant for sectors that require
skilled workers, particularly the business process
outsourcing industry, contrasts with its receding focus
to develop infrastructure and research and technology
for agriculture among others, Balisacan told
BusinessMirror.
Of the
first-quarter 6.9-percent gross domestic product growth,
the government attributed only 0.8 percentage point to
agriculture against 4.9 percentage points to the
services sector and 1.7 percentage points to the
industry sector.
“China,
for example, is spending at least one percent of its
gross value added in agriculture for research and
development compared with 0.1 percent for us. Let us
complain if we are being punished for its competitive
agriculture sector and ours is not,” he added, alluding
to surfeit Chinese farm products flooding the local
market.
In a
paper presented on Friday, Balisacan said agricultural
labor productivity had been declining due to weak
investments in the sector and a slow absorption of farm
workers in nonagriculture-based work.
“The
latter can be traced to the slow diversification of
rural incomes outside of the farm, which has hindered
the stimuli for growth in the nonfarm sector and held up
more rapid improvement of welfare especially in the
countryside,” he added.
Balisacan insinuated that current agriculture policies
were inadequate for improved per-capita productivity,
meaning more incremental benefits per individual, and
hence job generation in the sector remains
insubstantial.
“We have
been trying to prop up agricultural growth through
pricing policies instead,” he commented, citing tight
import controls on farm products that otherwise would
have been produced adequately with proper technology
dissemination.
“We
always blame
China
for flooding the market, but we do not see what it has
done [to raise its own agricultural productivity],”
Balisacan said.
The
former agriculture undersecretary commented there are no
strong investments in appropriate technologies,
especially research and development, since it is
considered not popular in the short term.
“If I am
a politician or a bureaucrat I have to show results
quickly . . . and by that, serious efforts in research
and development are ignored and instead impact
activities, which do not really improve productivity,
are done,” he commented.
The
paper, however, said the rapid degradation of natural
resources and regional diversity also had to do with
the tepid agricultural productivity, the latter
sometimes weighing down on the implementation of
projects or adoption of new technologies.
“Because
we have failed in improving productivity we have lost
our markets to other countries even in what we describe
as superstar crops like pineapple and sugar,” Balisacan
said. |
