Agriculture holds key to solving poverty
PULSE Asia survey last week said 38 percent of Filipinos would like the next president of the country to raise workers’ pay. A second concern was drugs (36%), followed by controlling inflation or prices (30%), fighting corruption (30%), reducing poverty (29%), and creating jobs (26%). It is significant to note that of the top six concerns, four have to do with economic problems.
We may be a “rising tiger” among the economies in our region because of our commendable Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but the progress has not trickled down to the masses. Too many families do not have enough to eat. The fourth quarter 2015 survey of the Social Weather Stations found 11.7 percent, or an estimated 2.6 million families, experienced involuntary hunger at least once in the last three months.
On the next administration and the next Congress which we will elect this coming May will fall the task of formulating and carrying out programs for these economic concerns -- which could worsen with the impending return of thousands of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) who have lost their jobs because of the ongoing world oil crisis.
Former Senator Francis Pangilinan, in an interview the other day, said 70 percent of the national poverty is rural. A great deal of the effort to solve poverty, therefore, must focus on our rural areas -- on farming and fisheries.
All these decades, he said, a succession of governments have not given the proper priority to agriculture. It is not just the government; the private sector also shares this neglect. It is a colonial mindset, with people seeing working on the land as demeaning, with such expressions as “hampaslupa” and “magtanim na lang ng kamote.”
Pangilinan, who now farms his own land in Cavite, sees the need for a number of things to give agriculture its proper place in the Philippine economy. Among these needs is a land use plan to stop the loss of so much irrigated land to developers, technology to improve farm efficiency, post-harvest facilities to reduce too much wastage in harvests, and – most of all – the need to work closely with farmers, to hold their hand, so to speak, to assure and encourage them to leave their old traditional practices and adopt modern farm practices. The nation’s agriculture must move from subsistence farming to viable farm enterprise.
There are, of course, other problems facing the country today – crime, drugs, foreign intrusion into our seas, our continuing colonial mentalilty – but economic development should be at the top of the program of action of the next administration and the next Congress. And since, as Senator Pangilinan has pointed out, 70 percent of the national poverty is rural, the search for solutions must concentrate on agriculture.