The Duterte administration must stop focusing on rice and allocate more funds to other agriculture subsectors if it wants to sustain the increase in farm output, economists from the Ateneo de Manila University said on Thursday.
Eagle Watch senior research fellow Alvin P. Ang said Philippine agriculture production remains “too erratic” despite growing by 6.18 percent in the second quarter and by 5.71 percent in the first half.
“Agriculture is still important but [government resources] should not be focused on rice alone”, Ang, who is also the director of Ateneo Center for Economic Research and Development, told the BusinessMirror.
“We are now seeing the effect of the fixation with rice. Concentrating resources on just one commodity would make it difficult for the government to immediately assist other subsectors that would encounter problems,” he added.
Ang said the government should see to it that all subsectors would get a slice of the agriculture budget.
“What’s happening right now is that there is a commodity being favored. Let’s not forget we still have coconut, we have cassava and other high-value commercial crops that could give farmers bigger value added,” he said.
“The government should distribute [the budget]. That’s why growth is erratic because only one sector is being assisted; the government should distribute that assistance,” Ang added.
The Ateneo economist also said the “Build, Build, Build” Program of the government should also benefit the farm sector.
“The government must roll out a similar program for agriculture. It will not only focus on constructing farm-to-market roads, but will also target the provision of modern equipment,” he said.
“Of the current labor force, 26 percent is in the agriculture sector. A lot of people are still in agriculture so you cannot leave the sector behind, especially when you are growing by 6 percent,” Ang added.
Cielito A. Habito, former director general of the National Economic and Development Authority and senior fellow of Eagle Watch, said the government should put more emphasis on making local farmers competitive against their Asean counterparts.
Habito also agreed with Ang that the government should forego its rice-centric policies and programs to allow the farm sector to grow faster.
“We have lagged behind other Asean countries, like Vietnam, which chose to go into growing coffee and high-value crops. This strategy is now contributing to their national income and feeding their own people,” he told the BusinessMirror.
“We have been too focused on rice that we have neglected coconut and fisheries. This fixation with rice is something that we should get out of,” Habito added.
Data released by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) on Tuesday showed that agricultural output in the second quarter recovered and grew by 6.18 percent year-on-year.
The PSA said the crops subsector remained as the main driver of farm growth in the April-to-June period.
“The crops subsector registered an 11.72-percent increase in output. It shared 50.75 percent of the total agricultural production,” the PSA said in its report, titled “Performance of Philippine Agriculture”.
Palay production in the second quarter rose by 11.72 percent to 4.15 million metric tons (MMT), from 3.71 MMT a year ago. The PSA attributed this to the expansion in areas planted with rice and the availability of irrigation water.
Favorable planting conditions also encouraged more farmers to plant corn. Output rose by nearly 46 percent to 1.3 MMT, from 911,000 metric tons recorded in the same period last year.
In the first half of the year, PSA data showed that farm-production growth averaged 5.71 percent.
Data provided to the BusinessMirror by the PSA showed the second-quarter growth was the highest since 2011, when the agriculture sector expanded by 6.68 percent.
In terms of first-semester growth, farm output this year was the highest since 1999, when it expanded by 9.82 percent. Between 1999 and 2017, agriculture production was the lowest last year, when it contracted by 3.39 percent.
The PSA said the agriculture sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP has been declining since 2006. Sans agriculture services and forestry, the sector’s output contributed only 8.2 percent to GDP in the past 10 years.
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Rice is a political commodity in the Philippines.