JAMES LIM ESCALANTE

The Philippines should be sufficient agriculturally. It’s a nation of rich volcanic soil, abundant rainfall, and a tropical climate that should make growing food easy. Yet, the country’s farm and fishery sector is in a state of persistent crisis. It is a paradox that defines a core national problem.

A large part of this challenge is the geography itself. The Philippines is one of the most disaster-prone nations on Earth. It is battered by an average of 20 typhoons a year. These storms bring devastating winds and floods that flatten rice paddies weeks before harvest and wash out the simple dirt roads that connect farms to markets.

When it is not flooding, it is the opposite. El Niño events bring long, baking droughts that dry up irrigation canals and scorch corn and vegetable fields. For a farmer, it is an endless cycle of destruction and recovery. This makes long-term investment, or even just planning for the next season, a constant gamble.

This relentless struggle has contributed to a quiet demographic collapse in the countryside. The person growing the nation’s food is, on average, 57 years old. Their children have watched them toil for minimal profit and have made a rational choice: they are leaving. They seek better-paying, less strenuous work in cities or abroad. This exodus creates a severe labor shortage. More than that, it creates an innovation gap. An aging workforce is less likely to adopt the new technologies and digital tools needed to make farming more efficient.

Even if farmers want to modernize, the system is often stacked against them. The country’s agrarian reform program, while noble in its goal of social justice, distributed land in tiny, fragmented parcels. The average farm is just over a single hectare. This is too small to be efficient. A farmer cannot use a tractor or modern machinery on such a small plot. They cannot achieve economies of scale. This fragmentation has trapped millions in a cycle of subsistence farming, creating a new class of “landed poor.

Let’s say a farmer overcomes all these odds. They survive the typhoon, manage their small plot, and produce a good harvest. They still face the challenge of just getting their food to the consumer. The Philippines suffers from notoriously poor infrastructure. A lack of paved farm-to-market roads means a large portion of a vegetable harvest can spoil or be damaged on the long, bumpy trip. Without access to cold storage facilities, farmers must sell their produce immediately. This puts them at the mercy of middlemen, who arrive at the farm gate and buy the produce for a low price, only to sell it for a massive profit in the cities. The farmer takes all the risk for a fraction of the reward.

When you add all this up—the bad weather, the aging workforce, the tiny farms, and the broken supply chains—you get a shocking result. The nation struggles to feed itself.

The most glaring example is rice. The Philippines is now the world’s number one importer of rice, buying millions of tons each year, mostly from Vietnam. While policies to liberalize rice imports were meant to lower prices for consumers, they have flooded the market with cheap foreign grain. This has been devastating to local farmers, who simply cannot compete. The story is the same for other basics. The country now regularly imports sugar, garlic, onions, and even fish.

Importing fish is perhaps the most telling sign of this crisis. For an archipelago with one of the longest coastlines in the world, it seems impossible. But the nation’s fisheries are collapsing, with total production hitting a two-decade low in 2024. This is a direct result of severe overfishing with an estimated 87% of fishing grounds already overexploited and widespread habitat destruction. Pollution and climate change have bleached the vital coral reefs that serve as breeding grounds for fish. This has created a desperate conflict at sea, where small-scale municipal fishers, watching their catches plummet, are pushed out by large, illegal commercial vessels that sweep through protected waters.

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