FARMING is profitable and various government programs are aimed at strengthening the social and financial capital in the agriculture sector to win back the youth into farming said Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio R. de los Reyes.
De los Reyes expressed concern that farms are now being manned by aging people in their late 50s, while their sons and daughters opt to find greener pastures elsewhere.
De los Reyes said various studies reveal that the average age of Filipino farmers is 57, which goes to show that most of the youth have shunned tilling the soil as a profession or business undertaking.
“The best way of getting our youth back into farming is to show them that they can get money out of it,” de los Reyes stressed in his speech at the “Social Business Summit 2014” held at the Gawad Kalinga’s “Enchanted Farm” in Angat, Bulacan, recently.
He believes that if farmers would be able to develop their social capital by forming themselves into a cohesive organization, which, in turn, would help enhance their financial capital through easy access to credit, the youth will be lured to do business in agriculture.
He said most financing institutions prefer to deal with a credible farmers’ organization, rather than with individual farmers because it is easier to deal with one group compared to a number of individuals.
De los Reyes said the government has established a production credit-assistance program with insurance package to enable the farmers to have a starting capital for farm inputs and protect them from possible losses in case of calamities.
“One major requirement of this credit assistance is for our farmer-beneficiaries to organize themselves into a credible organization,” he said.
De los Reyes said it is also vital to teach farmers how to plant and show them what to do to make farming more profitable, so that the youth might consider taking a second look at it as a profession.
He said the government has linked up with academe and business sectors to provide farmers new farming methods to enhance farm productivity and offer value-added schemes, like processing their raw products into finished products to increase their market value.
“Being an organization brings a lot of opportunities to our farmer-beneficiaries. It helps them purchase farm inputs at a much lesser cost, while giving them the opportunity to transact business with big business firms in need of raw farm products,” de los Reyes said.
The ability of a farmers’ organization to buy in bulk enables it to purchase farm inputs for its members, like seedlings and fertilizer, among others, at wholesale prices, which an individual farmer could not avail himself of because he only buys for his own needs.
De los Reyes said an organization of farmers could plan ahead what crop to plant to meet the volume requirements of a big business firm that it had transacted with to be its supplier of raw farm outputs.