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Monday, November 6, 2017
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BASED on the census of the Philippine Statistics Authority, from 2013 to 2015 there was a steady decline of an average of .53 to 1.92 percent on the country’s agricultural employment rate. In 2013, there were at least 11.29 million Filipinos involved in agriculture but this shrunk to 11.073 million 2015. This means that at least 216,768 people who used to contribute in food production have passed on or have moved to other forms of livelihood in just two years.
In short, we are losing at least one percent of our workforce in the agricultural sector every year. The country might become fully dependent on food imports if the pattern is not reversed.
To what do we attribute this decline? It is thought that young people today would rather work in call centers and do odd jobs in fast food chains and department stores.
We are also deeply concerned with the shrinking space for agricultural lands converted into industrial and residential real estates, and the dwindling production capacity of the remaining farmlands due to the damaging effects of climate change. Add that to the diminishing number of our workforce in food production and the country will definitely plunge into a severe food crisis.
The government must perk up the interest of the youth to go into farming perhaps through increased educational subsidies and scholarships for students who want to pursue a career in the agricultural sector. Agricultural colleges and universities should be also modernized to allow the country’s new breed of farmers to learn the world’s most advanced technologies in agricultural production.
We should start dismantling the stigma that farming is hard, dirty, financially unrewarding, and suited only for the uneducated. In other countries, farmers are highly respected and very well-off. If we can modernize our farming industry, our farmers will never feel the need to look for other means of livelihood and our country will become food self-sufficient.
We have an oversupply of nurses, teachers, criminologists, and information technology professionals and they mostly end up in call centers or they go overseas. On the other hand, the people who toil our soil are rapidly disappearing.
We should reverse this pattern before it’s too late.
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