One of the President’s campaign promises was to make food affordable and accessible to all Filipinos. This is also included in Duterte’s 10-point socioeconomic agenda. His administration has committed to promote rural and value chain development toward increasing agricultural and rural enterprise productivity and rural tourism.
Strategies to achieve the President’s goal of expanding local food production are detailed in his economic blueprint—the Philippine Development Plan (PDP). Titled “Inequality-Reducing Transformation [Pagbabago]” Part III, it has five chapters, which tackled government initiatives to wipe out poverty by 2022. One of the chapters targets the expansion of economic opportunities in agriculture, forestry and fisheries (AFF).
The Duterte administration understood that its poverty-reduction efforts would not succeed if it would not focus on the agriculture and fisheries sector. The government noted that the AFF sector is pivotal in generating employment for about a third of the country’s labor force. The manufacturing and services sectors, which have buoyed GDP in recent years, rely on the AFF sector.
However, the government has yet to roll out many of the policies and initiatives intended to prop up agricultural productivity and food production as outlined in the PDP. To be fair, the government, through the Department of Agriculture (DA), has already implemented some of the measures in the PDP. In the past two years, the government was able to develop an integrated color-coded agricultural map and increase the number of small farmers and fishermen with agricultural insurance. But many of the 20 strategies identified in the PDP have yet to be implemented. These include the diversification into commodities with high-value adding and market potential.
For the longest time, the Philippines has been fixated with rice production. This is not surprising because rice is our staple food. But years of shooting for “self-sufficiency,” i.e., eliminating the need for imports, have shown that the country will not be able to beat Vietnam and Thailand in rice production. Unfortunately, among all the cash crops grown in the Philippines, rice is still preferred because the return on investment is faster compared to planting high-value crops such as cacao and coffee. Rice farmers can earn twice a year, but those planting cacao and coffee would have to wait a minimum of three years before they can earn from their crops.
If the government is serious about diversification, it must provide farmers easy access to affordable formal credit. The President has already taken the first step to make this happen by ordering the Land Bank of the Philippines to go back to its original mandate of helping farmers and fishermen. But more must be done, like ensuring banks’ compliance with the Agri-Agra Law (Republic Act 10000).
Also, the government has yet to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to increasing investments in research and development activities and enhancing the capacity of farmers to use better and new technologies. These are key initiatives that could boost agricultural productivity. Unfortunately, the government’s expenditure program does not reflect its commitment to these measures.
The Duterte administration has three more years to do what must be done to realize the goals of increasing farmers’ income and expanding the access of Filipinos to affordable food. The government is now bent on lifting the quantitative restriction on rice, and this could help cut the price of the staple, but it remains just a temporary solution. The agriculture sector needs all the help it can get. With climate change increasingly threatening farm production, complacency would negate all the gains this government has realized in this sector.