NEXT month, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will deliver his fifth State of the Nation Address (SONA). I am certain he will enumerate the accomplishments his administration attained during the past year. Then he will recite a litany of problems and challenges facing the country, and the actions that his government will pursue in response.
For agriculture, I am not sure what he is going to emphasize. Will he herald accomplishments despite the sector’s lackadaisical performance? Or will his address explain reasons such as significant fertilizer and fuel price increases, the lingering threat of African swine fever, the destructive typhoons that visited last year and the looming threat of a major El Niño toward the end of 2026?
I am hoping that he will outline a serious strategy to reverse the fortunes of the agricultural sector. Low agricultural productivity is not simply a by-product of the above man-made and natural factors. Low productivity has been a trend for decades now and arresting it should serve as the main goal of any administration genuinely wanting to develop the agriculture sector and improve the socioeconomic welfare of our tillers.
The writings on the wall are crystal clear. For more than two decades, the agriculture sector’s average growth has been around 0.3 percent compared to population growth that has hovered around 1.7 percent annually and higher. Simply put, there is no way that agricultural growth can meet the food requirements of our people.
We have the lowest total factor productivity (a measure of the effects of technology, innovation, management practices and efficiency improvements on economic output) among leading Southeast Asian countries.
We have only three agri exports (coconut oil, banana and pineapple) that are valued at $200 million or more per year while Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam have more than 10 each.
A Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department study showed that while the budget for rice has significantly increased over the past two decades, our rice self-sufficiency has declined to just a little over 70 percent from near the 90-percent mark.
Our agri-food processing sector is growing at almost 3 percent per year. But this is not due to the raw materials supplied by local farmers but a steady and increasing dependence on imported raw materials.
We are surrounded by bodies of water, having a coastline longer than that of the United States, but we import thousands of metric tons of fish, including bangus (our national fish) fry, and 93 percent of our salt requirement.
We import significant amounts of our vegetable needs (including onions and garlic), coffee, dairy (milk), palm oil (a substitute for coconut oil), corn and sugar, which we used to massively export in the past.
Across high-potential agricultural exports — including mangoes, durian, coffee, cacao, dragon fruit, pili, avocado, papaya, and recently, ube — our farmers cannot provide adequate supply of quality raw materials that the agri-food processor sector needs to transform the country into an agri-export dynamo.
We have given substantial and endless “ayudas” to farmers and fisherfolk, and yet they remain dirt poor due to low productivity and the resulting low incomes.
Low farm productivity has also resulted in high food prices, particularly for poor Filipino consumers. A 2018 World Food Program study revealed that even if the poor workers spent 70 percent of their income buying food, they would not be able to access adequate nutritious food for their families.
And for more than two decades now, food inflation contributes almost half to yearly inflation. Note that food and nonalcoholic beverages is only one of the 11 parameters used in measuring the consumer price index.
In turn, high food prices contributed to scandalously high malnutrition and stunting among Filipino kids ages 0-5. Latest statistics reveal that stunting actually rose to 25.3 percent in 2025, a 1.7-percent hike compared to 2023. In other words, one of every four Filipino kids suffer from stunting. While other neighboring countries experienced a declining trend, ours is embarrassingly rising.
This, in turn, accounts for the dismal learning capability of school-age kids as 90 percent of the human brain develops during conception up to 5 years of age. A World Bank study revealed that in 2023, our learning poverty rate was 91 percent. This means that 9 out of 10 Filipino children ages 10 were unable to read and understand a simple text appropriate to their age.
Recently, Sen. Bam Aquino emphasized that malnutrition and stunting among Filipino kids should be seriously addressed if we are to improve the learning capability of school-age children. What he forgot to recognize is that the malnutrition and stunting problems will never be properly addressed without reforming our agricultural policies, programs and projects. After all, agriculture is the supply side of the equation. When there is persistent and increasing supply shortfalls, demand (nutrition) can never be adequately met.
I expect that there will be a litany of promises and programs again made in the SONA on how our agricultural sector will be developed during the last two years of this administration. But without any concrete strategy and plan to reverse declining agricultural productivity, these pronouncements should be treated as mere PR stunts.
A good plan and program should be based on a clear understanding of the sector’s fundamental problems. The objective of any action should emanate from an understanding of this root problem. Any plan, program or pronouncement that deviates from this should be considered a mere ploy to delude the public, once again, of the agriculture sector’s real situation.
fdadriano88@gmail.com
