Corporatization needed to boost Philippine agriculture

MANILA, Philippines — As the Philippine agriculture continues to lag behind, economists suggest that corporatization is needed to boost and make the sector productive again.

In a recent television interview, economist Emmanuel De Dios said the protracted agrarian reform of government and lack of support for extensions and service have resulted in the fragmentation of production in agriculture and very low productivity.

“In order to get it back up to where it ought to have been, you need either an upsurge of cooperatives or the corporatization of agriculture in order to get the scale to make agriculture productive again,” De Dios said.

“It’s not so easy [to bounce back] because a lot of things that happened to agriculture have fragmented the production systems and it will take a lot of effort and the right analysis to put it back together again,” he said.

De Dios said corporatization would mean investment of large amount of capital into large agriculture ventures.

“This is the same Malaysia has been able to do it with their rubber plantations and other crop. That has not been in the offing in the Philippines except in some parts of Mindanao where their corporate structure has taken over,” De Dios said.

“If productivity is not raised, agriculture will continue to be a dying sector,” he said.

Economist Raul Fabella echoed the same sentiment, saying that fragmentation in the country is now so severe.

“It is now so severe that our corporations who want to source their inputs from our farmers cannot get them in proper quantity and in good enough quality so they are forced indeed to import from the outside,” Fabella said.

“We have to be able to correct that and push that fragmentation back to bring back capital to the agriculture sector and we will be able to answer the needs of big companies who need to source their inputs from domestic,” he said.

The current administration is targeting to grow the sector by as much as four percent in the next three years to achieve greater food security.

Over the last 10 years, the sector only grew by a measly average of 1.1 percent, always short of feeding the country’s growing population.

Agriculture Secretary William Dar has earlier proposed a strategy built around eight paradigms that also make up the “new thinking” for agriculture to help realize Duterte’s vision for a food-secure Philippines and to double the income of farmers and fisherfolks.