Fixing our farms

Consider the following facts, all drawn from official statistics:

“Seventy percent of the Filipino poor can be found in the rural areas, where the dominant source of livelihood is farming. Farmers, especially coconut farmers, make up the poorest segment of our population.

“In the first half of this year, the overall economy grew by more than 7 percent—a ‘sizzling’ rate of growth, according to government statisticians—but agriculture actually moved the other way, with output falling by 3.7 percent.

“As of last April, more than 800,000 jobs were lost over the preceding year in the agriculture sector, in spite of the brisk overall economic expansion.”

Consider also the fact that our ASEAN neighbors, especially Thailand and Indonesia, trained their agricultural scientists in the Philippines in the 1960s and 70s, as if to acknowledge our superiority in the agricultural sciences. Look at where their agricultural sectors—and their farmers—are now, and look at ours. Something obviously went wrong along the way so that the former students have left their mentors far behind.

In the late 1980s, some faculty members of the University of the Philippines-Los Baños prepared a volume, “Agenda for Action for the Philippine Rural Sector,” for the Department of Agriculture under then President Corazon Aquino. This work, dubbed then as the “Green Book,” analyzed problems in and recommended solutions for the country’s farm sector. Now, some 23 years later, most of the problems identified then remain problems that we continue to face today. Our key agricultural challenges have hardly changed through more than two decades. The problems may be summed up in low farm incomes, low rural employment, lack of food security, and low productivity leading to weak competitiveness of our farm sector.

What have we been doing wrong all this time that Philippine agriculture has largely failed to uplift the lives of most Filipinos in the countryside? What should the government of President Benigno Aquino III do differently, to get us out of this seeming trap?

The problems of the agricultural sector have been traced to misplaced goals, inappropriate strategies, misallocation of budget, and last but probably foremost, weaknesses in governance. On misplaced goals, it has long been observed that our agriculture bureaucracy led by the DA has been inordinately focused on production targets, often at the expense of farm incomes and welfare. Our lawmakers are partly to blame for this. DA officials assert that as they defend their budget in Congress every year, legislators always take them to task for production levels of this crop or that, but hardly ever ask about farmers’ incomes or welfare.

The other misplaced goal is the seeming fixation on rice self-sufficiency over broader concerns in the sector, including food security in general. It is said that an agriculture secretary in the Philippines will be judged a success if he is able to attain self-sufficiency in rice even if he fails in everything else. He may succeed in everything else about his job, including raising farm incomes, but if he fails in rice, he will still be a failure in the public’s eyes.

But this should not be. Food security is much more than rice self-sufficiency, and in fact does not even require the latter. For many years, the Malaysian government has actually seen wisdom in not aspiring for rice self-sufficiency, but targeting production of only 65 percent of its requirements. They are, nonetheless, food secure and their farmers have a much higher standard of living than ours.

I cannot forget a particular trip to Malaysia many years ago when our group was brought on a tour of a “typical” farm community. As we randomly interviewed a farmer to ask what problems he faced, we were at a loss how to react as he complained that his car was over five years old and needed to be replaced! That was in the 1980s. Malaysian agriculture has apparently progressed through the years that they now have the confidence to raise their rice target to 80 percent.

Back here at home, misplaced goals naturally lead to inappropriate strategies. Beyond the inordinate attention to rice (and yet still failing to achieve the goals therein), there has also been an undue focus on the production system, to the neglect of the rest of the value chain leading to the final consumers. And yet, the welfare of the farmers and consumers also hinge largely on what happens as the product moves from the farm to the dinner table, i.e., how transport and processing are done, and by whom. Do farmers have adequate market information and bargaining power? Are there monopolies in certain links of the chain, unduly raising costs? Are there enough processing enterprises to expand farmers’ market choices and absorb excess farm production when harvests are good? Are there losses in quantity and quality along the way? Are the logistics facilities cost effective? Instead, our government has traditionally focused on supporting farmers with subsidized seeds, fertilizers, chemicals and other inputs to production—often not responsive to actual needs on the ground, and often not even getting these commodities to the purported beneficiaries due to massive corruption.

But wait, there’s more. Next week we look at how the agriculture budget ought to be reformed, and how bad governance has become the foremost obstacle to achieving meaningful improvement in this still most important sector in our economy.

E-mail: cielito.habito@gmail.com