Indicators of the collapse of Philippine agriculture are not difficult to find. Official statistics indicate growing agricultural trade deficits, declining GDP share, and grinding rural poverty everywhere. Most worrisome, there are reports in various regions that there is an acute shortage of agricultural workers because majority of the millennials and those belonging to the younger generation Z have been avoiding farm work like a plague. The Philippine farming population is aging and fading away.
The agricultural sector is facing an existential sustainability issue. How will the newly-appointed DA Secretary William Dar handle this challenge? Will he end up like Secretary Manny Pinol, who waged a losing fight against the economic technocrats who pushed for the all-out liberalization of the rice sector without any clear transition program for the domestic palay producers?
The desolation of the agricultural sector started in the 1980s. The government, during the last years of the Marcos Administration and the second half of the decade under President Corazon Aquino, surrendered to the IMF-World Bank’s “structural adjustment policy” (SAP) conditionality: deregulate the agricultural sector and phase out government credit and price support to the sector. DA Secretary Arturo Tangco, architect of the Masagana 99, was bitter as the rice self-sufficiency program quickly wilted. Under the SAP austerity, funding for rural infrastructures and irrigation systems also dried up, further weakening the productivity of the sector. The 1980s was a disaster decade for the agricultural sector.
In the 1990s, the desolation of the agricultural sector continued under the SAP-driven agricultural deregulation program. This time, the deregulation program was reinforced by the decision of the government to be one of the founding members of the World Trade Organization (WTO). As part of its commitment to the WTO, the government placed the whole sector under the tariff regime, meaning the private sector can come in and import any agricultural product.
However, the WTO allowed rice to be temporarily exempted from the coverage of the tariffication program. The rationale given: the Philippines needed some time to transform its rice sector to become globally competitive. In this regard, Congress rushed the passage of the Agricultural Fisheries and Modernization Act (AFMA) to help modernize the fishery sector and the production of rice and other crops. And yet, AFMA turned out to be a disaster itself. Poorly funded and poorly implemented, AFMA failed to stop the downward collapse of agriculture.
Meanwhile, another poorly-implemented agricultural program came into being – the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). The CARP’s enabling law was passed in 1988, and yet, three decades after, DAR is still in process of “completing” CARP’s implementation. Worse, majority of the agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs) have remained poor, or just a little better than the landless rural poor. Incidentally, the latter (e.g., ambulant agricultural workers, camote miners, slash-and-burn hillside farmers, coastal fisherfolks, etc.) are more numerous than the ARBs. And yet, there are no clear alternative programs for these landless rural poor.
One reason for the continuing poverty of the ARBs is the failure in transformation. Secretary DAR mentioned the importance of making farmers “agri-preneurs”. Yes, farming is business and should be managed in a professsional and business-like manner. For this, the ARBs and small farmers should possess the skills and knowhow on how to prepare and implement a farm business plan. But who will help them acquire these skills and knowhow? The agricultural extension officers? These extension officers have been placed under the command of the LGUs, no thanks to the Local Autonomy law. It is also doubtful if these extension officers are trained to become trainers in this field.
Partnership with the big corporations? This is a controversial proposition. The “corporative” proposal during the time of President Joseph Estrada was severely criticized by farmer leaders, who believed that the proposal is a gift to the big corporations that want to access and manage the lands of the small farmers without being dragged into excruciating land cases under CARP. For example, there are numerous land and employment conflicts over the contract growing arrangements that big banana exporters in Mindanao have concluded with the small farmers holding the certificates of land ownership or CLOAs over these lands.
To summarize, one does not need rocket science to determine the root causes of agricultural stagnation. Foremost among these is the SAP-driven and WTO-reinforced agricultural deregulation program, aggravated by the mangled and never-ending implementation of CARP and various modernization programs.
Also, most of the government programs for agriculture in the past have been criticized to be graft-ridden, e.g., distribution of fertilizer and farm inputs intended for small farmers ending in the hands of LGUs in the cemented cities of Metro Manila. One will not be surprised if the green light given to the big rice importers under the Rice Tariffication law will be used by the unscrupulous to under-declare imports and avoid paying the right amount of duties. Is this one explanation why rice prices have not gone down substantially, and yet, palay prices have been diving down at or below production cost, pushing palay farmers out of farming.
To complete the picture on the desolation of the agricultural sector, one must add here the environmental problems: continuing erosion of the resource base, deforestation, soil degradation and the weak fortification of the countryside against climate change risks.
May kinabukasan ba ang ating agrikultura at magsasaka? Does agriculture have a future? More in the next issue.