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.
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.
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, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. 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, every year we are losing at least one percent of our workforce in the agricultural sector. If the pattern is not reversed, the country might become fully dependent on food imports.
The dwindling production capacity of farmlands due to the damaging effects of climate change and the shrinking space for agricultural lands converted into industrial and residential real estates are also matters of deep concern. 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.
