Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result!
— Albert Einstein

MAYPAJO, Caloocan City — It's year 2025, the Year of the Snake, which when combined with the wood element emphasizes adaptability, creativity and long-term planning, but from the looks of it, agriculture—particularly the rice sector—is starting inauspiciously this year.
We recall that 40 years ago, our government imported only around 160,000 metric tons (MT) of rice. However, in the succeeding years, this rose to more than 200,000 MT and reached almost 300,000 MT during the fateful year when the 'People Power Revolution' broke out in 1986. Those importation levels were actual major sources of embarrassment for the Marcos Sr. administration, which had boasted of attaining rice self-sufficiency through its Green Revolution program.
Fast forward tayo ngayon.
Lsst year, we imported nearly 5 million MT of rice and, as the United States Department of Agriculture which runs a relatively reliable forecasting model on agricultural exports and imports, it estimates that we will import more than 5 million MT this year.
And the downward trend in our country's agricultural productivity is unfortunately not confined to rice alone. We were formerly a major exporter of sugar and other products as well like tobacco, coffee and tropical fruits, among them banana and pineapple. Now we import sugar from Thailand. Fortunately, we still export some fruits (not to mention women and labor, too), but in the case of banana, we are threatened by the continuing ravages of the Panama disease virus and the development of massive banana plantations in Cambodia and Laos funded by Chinese capital and so we are slowly being dislodged at the apex of leading banana producers in the world by countries which never produced significant bananas for export before.
Additionally, we were also major coconut producer and exporter of coconut oil. Now, our local coconut production lags behind Indonesia and Sri Lanka and our coconut oil export has been overtaken by palm oil in the global market. The fact is that we are now even importing half a million MT of palm oil every year.
And we are also importing around two million bangus (milkfish) fry from Indonesia, when supposedly milkfish is our country's national fish. We are an archipelagic country with more than 7,000 islands, but we resort to massive importation of various fish species to plug supply deficits that are growing by the year.
In the meantime, local corn production is suffering as well as we can only meet less than 60 percent of our total annual demand. We thus have to resort to massive importation of wheat as feed for our livestocks, which is a poor substitute to corn as animal feed. Similarly, we import hundreds of thousands of tons of different vegetables per year from neighboring countries in Asia despite possessing the agro-climatic conditions to become a vegetable-surplus-producing country.
Our levels of meat importation are also increasing despite having all the wherewithal to significantly increase production to meet the rising demand of fast-food chains. Recently, poultry producers complained about the massive entry of chicken imports that have depressed local prices and adversely affected local producers.
There are glaring proofs that our agriculture sector is losing on all fronts and yet we have not seen a sense of urgency among our policymakers on how to turn around the unrelenting march towards a crisis that would soon engulf us.
Unfortunately, what we are seeing are the same solutions applied in the past that are now being offered as remedies to address the underdevelopment of our agricultural sector. Among them more 'ayudas' to small farmers instead of focusing on raising farm productivity per unit of labor and land; focus on production without substantial result and, in the process, neglecting to address the problems along the agricultural value; and obsession with attaining rice self-sufficiency with little positive results, despite pouring an average of 60 percent of the Department of Agriculture's yearly budget and, expectedly, providing little support to the development of crops where the country has a comparative advantage.
Added to these, the dispersal of funding for agricultural infrastructure projects is determined by 'corrupt' legislators who should be focusing their provision in areas where the highest returns in terms of productivity and incomes can be achieved. There is also inadequate investments in research, development and extension that compounds the problem and this despite studies showing that the highest return in agriculture is in research and technological innovations.


From the looks of it, agriculture — particularly the rice sector — is starting inauspiciously this year.
In view of all of these, we reiterate our belief that the Year of the Wood Snake is truly an inauspicious year for Philippine agriculture.

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