AGRI TALKS: The future budget for future farmers
Known for its productive lands, Philippines is expected to have sufficient agricultural goods produced to suffice the needs of its people but this seems to be not the case. The Philippine agricultural sector comprised 19% of GDP in 2009 and employed 34% of the labor force. Hence, with this number our agricultural products are made up of only 8.3% of total Philippine commodity exports and Philippine agricultural exports were the smallest of the ASEAN-5.
This conflict is connected with the agricultural goods harvested by our Filipino farmers. The area is not the major hindrance I see; it is the number of new generations of farmers where the Philippines do not have. About 12 million Filipinos work in the agricultural sector for the past administration. If the country can significantly increase its exports and imports of agricultural goods, agricultural provinces would generate much greater revenue, provide more employment opportunities, and would lessen poverty in rural areas and in the whole part of our country as well. This is really important for Mindanao, the country’s breadbasket that has great underdeveloped potential for agricultural exports.
We can’t do away the fact that we are having self-sufficiency of agricultural goods because of the number of workers in the field. The number that must count in the soonest time should be the number of farmers and not the goods itself. Productions of grains, vegetables, rice are just enough for every Filipino but the production of growers are in an alarming scale.
New free trade agreements that had come into effect in ASEAN presented both challenges and opportunities to the agricultural sector. According to former budget secretary, Benjamin Diokno, the Philippine government should focus on the agricultural sector which employs a third of the labor force. "It is cheaper to create jobs in agriculture than in other sectors", he said in an interview.
In addition, pushing for the sector's development will lead to inclusive growth, especially as agricultural workers are the poorest in the labor sector. The feed is just that easy. It just has to go with the agricultural programs that multiply the employment range of the agricultural sectors. The programs must have additional benefits to farmers as they are the ones creating growth in our agricultural cache.
"Agricultural growth in the last 5 years was anemic," Diokno stressed. "If you pay attention to agriculture in the rural area, that's growth inclusive." Data from the Philippine Statistics Authority showed that there is no significant change in poverty incidence among farmers. But they take more of the obligation of harvesting the sufficient supply our country must have so they must be paid off by that. Now, in President Duterte’s term, the House of Representatives budget on the proposed P50.6 billion budget of the Department of Agriculture and its attached agencies for 2017 will be sure enough to have all the agricultural goods sufficient unless the term of calamities. But we must also then be focusing on training new sets of farmers that yield the products from our own land. The millennial generation is of High-Tech form of living but we do not want to happen that one of these coming years the field will be having robot farmers. We have sufficient supplies of agricultural goods as of now and we can sustain it through the hands of the growers who help us in planting the next field of our young.
