The development of agro industries will help reduce the country’s high underemployment rate, particularly in the agriculture sector, according to the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda).
Socioeconomic Planning Secretary and Neda Director General Ernesto M. Pernia said underemployment is a bigger problem in the country and agriculture workers are among those who suffer from it.
Based on the latest employment numbers, there are 7.51 million Filipinos who are looking for additional jobs or full-time employment.
“There is a lack of full time jobs. They are employed but they still want to work, that’s underemployment,” Pernia said. “Underemployment is caused by insufficient income.”
Pernia said agriculture workers are “critically underemployed” because many of them are unpaid family workers.
According to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), around 8.6 percent, or 358,310 Filipinos, worked without pay in family-operated farms or businesses.
Nationwide, there are 11.62 million agriculture workers, or 27.9 percent, of the total 41.66 million employed Filipinos.
“Those in agriculture are critically underemployed. You need to have more nonfarm economic activities where they can go when they’re seasonally unemployed in agriculture. [These activities should allow them to] move to small and medium enterprises, nonfarm work, or semifarm and semi-industrial firms,” Pernia said.
Neda Undersecretary Adoracion Navarro said underemployment is also affected by a mismatch of quality labor that is available and available jobs.
To resolve this, Navarro said Neda’s regional offices, particularly in Calabarzon, support job summits and expos and engages the academe and industry leaders through dialogue to address jobs-skills mismatch concerns.
“We also convene state universities and technical vocational schools to offer education programs which directly address the need of the industries and then industries will have dialogue with line agencies,” Navarro said.
In the October 2016 round of the Labor Force Survey, the country’s unemployment rate slowed to 4.7 percent, the lowest in a decade.
However, the country’s underemployment rate increased to 18 percent from 17.6 percent in October 2015.
The PSA said underemployed persons who work for less than 40 hours in a week are called visibly underemployed persons. They accounted for 53.7 percent of the total underemployed in October 2016.
By comparison, the underemployed persons who worked for 40 hours or more in a week made up 45.1 percent.
By sector, 43.5 percent of the underemployed worked in the services sector, while 39.1 percent were in the agriculture sector. Those in the industry sector accounted for 17.3 percent.