The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations urged the Philippine government to increase its investments in rural areas to discourage Filipino farmers from migrating to other countries.
FAO Representative in the Philippines José Luis Fernández noted that migration is one of the “pressing” issues confronting the Philippine farm sector today, particularly in areas affected by conflict and poverty.
“For a very long time now, investing in rural development and food security has been at the core of the partnership between the FAO and the Department of Agriculture,” Fernandez said in his speech during the opening ceremonies of the World Food Week on October 9.
He said these include increasing farm production and productivity, restoring livelihoods after disasters, building resilience equipping people with skills to pursue off-farm livelihoods and increasing their business skills, and establishing linkages with markets.
“But much remains to be done to create the right conditions for rural families to stay in their communities and prosper there,” Fernandez said.
“In areas where conflict, political instability, lack of opportunity, extreme poverty and food insecurity prevail, people find themselves with no choice other than to move,” he added.
The FAO official noted that most available jobs in agriculture are associated with low and unstable incomes, gender inequality in pay and opportunities, and limited social protection.
“In recent years, the impacts of more intense and frequent natural disasters and climate change have exacerbated the situation. This is even more pronounced in parts of Mindanao, which have already been suffering from decades of conflict and is also projected to be one of the most at-risk regions to the impacts of climate change,” he said.
Citing a report prepared by the International Organization for Migration, Fernandez noted that Maguindanao, which is one of the poorest provinces in the Philippines, has become one of the top 10 sources of overseas Filipino workers today.
“It is a primary source province of Muslim migrants, mainly women, seeking overseas employment, particularly in Malaysia and the Gulf countries,” he said.
Despite the challenges faced by the Philippine government, the FAO noted that it is capable of rolling out the necessary measures to boost food production.
In a study published last month, the FAO noted that, despite the presence of conflict for two decades, the Philippines managed to reduce its undernourished population to 13.9 million in 2016, from 14.1 million in 2014.
“Countries that have recently been relatively free of conflict and/or experienced low-intensity, localized conflict made the greatest progress,” the FAO said in the report published in Rome recently.
“Only 14 of the 46 countries affected by conflict achieved the MDG 1c target, of which, eight have been relatively free of civil conflict in recent years [the Philippines, Angola, Cambodia, Georgia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Nepal and Uzbekistan] or experienced very localized low-intensity conflict [the Philippines],” it added.
The FAO study noted that the Arroyo administration’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program could have helped in reducing the number of conflict-related incidents that posed threats to the country’s food security.
“A recent study in the Philippines offers experimental evidence of conditional-cash transfers leading to a substantial decrease in conflict-related incidents in treatment villages relative to control villages,” the study read.
The FAO defined conflict as “struggles between interdependent groups that have either actual or perceived incompatibilities with respect to needs, values, goals, resources
or intentions.”
“This definition includes [but is broader than] armed conflict—that is organized collective violent confrontations between at least two groups, either state or non-state actors,” it said.
According to the FAO study, the prevalence of the undernourishment in the Philippines’s total population in 2014 to 2016 declined to 13.8 percent, from 16.3 percent in 2004 to 2006.