FILIPINOS consume 17 million to 18 million metric tons of rice annually. On the supply side, Filipino rice farmers produce only 12 million to 13 million metric tons of rice from a mere 6 percent of land area of the entire country devoted to rice farming. We are one of the top rice-consuming countries in the world. This small percentage of land area for rice farming is under pressure to be reduced further to a smaller percentage as urbanization sprawls into the rural areas. The demand for land for renewable energy, particularly solar power plants, aggravates the shrinking of these rice fields.
Basic economics will tell us that this kind of shortage in supply and high demand in rice should translate to higher income for our rice farmers. However, our rice farmers continue to be the poorest among our citizens. Farming has become so discredited among the next generation that even farmers themselves would not encourage their children to be farmers. At present, the average age of a Filipino farmer is 56 years old. On the other hand, the median age of Filipinos is 27 years old. This puts the difference between the average age of Filipino farmer to the median of the population at 30 years old. The Philippines has one of the youngest populations in the world, albeit there are signs of aging. But it also has one of the oldest farmers’ populations. Policy makers are concerned about food security as less Filipinos engage in farming, particularly the back-breaking rice farming. The growing scarcity of farmers in the rural areas is felt not only with the increasing labor cost, but with the extreme difficulty of finding warm bodies to help till the land and retaining them. Data shows that our food security is going towards import dependency. This is not security at all as we depend on other countries to feed our population.
Who would like to be a farmer in the Philippines if over generations, farmers remained and continue to wallow in the miseries of penury and hard labor? Add to this the losses incurred in the damaging effects of climate change such as El Niño and La Niña, the vicious and merciless wrath of pestilence such as the African swine fever and avian flu that take away the other sources of farmers in tending livestock and animals. No wonder our farmers are being pushed to the edge of despair, a lot of whom has already fallen into.
Since I engaged in rice-farming and livestock farming myself, I experienced these losses firsthand. Fortunately, I have a stable source of income from my professional employment. This allows me to absorb the losses as they happen. But for most poor farmers, an occurrence of one of these disasters will mean terrible hunger and radical disruption of their family’s lives such that children will have to stop going to school and sick members of family will be left without medical care and tragically left to the mercies of benefactors without which a family will lose such precious life of a loved one.
When I started rice farming in 2023, the cost of rice production was P15 per kilogram. When harvest time came, rice traders offered to buy it at a mere P9 per kg. As I had no storage facility nor drying and milling machines, I was thinking of selling at a loss so I could dispose of the palay grains to avoid the God-given bountiful harvest rotting unnecessarily. Thus, it was such welcome news to hear Sen. Kiko Pangilinan advocating fiercely for the implementation of the Sagip Saka Act, which he so painstakingly worked on to be passed into law in 2019. Upon returning to the Senate floor, he put to task the government agencies, specifically the Department of Agriculture (DA), on the law’s implementation. His efforts in compelling government agencies to buy locally produced rice raised the buying price of palay to between P20 to 23 per kg.
One major reason also for the ridiculous pricing of rice is the lack of storage, grain drying equipment and milling facilities for farmers. With these facilities inaccessible, the traders force the farmers to sell to them even at a loss whenever harvest time comes. This explains why palay was priced at an extremely low price of P9 per kg while milled rice is priced at a high price of P55 per kg. It would truly help the farmers if they could mill their harvest on their own and sell the milled rice directly to the market.
Our leaders in the Department of Agriculture can devote a substantial chunk of the budget to providing these agricultural equipment, storage and drying facilities to the farmers instead of allocating budget for more farm-to-market roads which since my childhood have been getting copious budget allocations. Yet most of these farm-to-market roads earned the moniker of being roads coming from the farm and not leading to the market but to the politician’s private resort, or the project funds going into the politicians’ pockets. This is just one of the many reforms that must be done, including better enforcement of laws against the illegal smuggling of rice into the country. Until then, our farmers remain poor and our country remains to be food-insecure.
