By Marron Joshua F. Mendoza
THE Federation of Free Farmers (FFF) said President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. has not achieved sufficient growth in farming output to keep up with the rising population.
FFF Chairman and former Agriculture Secretary Leonardo Q. Montemayor said in a statement that both agriculture and fisheries sectors remained stagnant relative to the population’s 1% growth rate, even though the Department of Agriculture (DA) has steadily been granted higher budgets.
Mr. Montemayor noted that despite the DA allocating 60% of its funding to the rice program, palay (unmilled rice) yields per hectare have only improved from 4.11 tons per hectare in 2022 to 4.14 tons per hectare in 2025, well below the DA’s five-ton target.
He also noted the overreliance on imports to meet increasing consumer demand, saying that the country has imported around 30% of its rice requirements since 2022, against less than 10% a decade ago.
“Today, the country has the dubious distinction of being the biggest rice importer in the world,” Mr. Montemayor said.
Mr. Montemayor said tariff reductions and the resulting growth of imports following the issuance of Executive Order No. 62 did not reduce retail prices while costing producers and farmers significant income, while discouraging them from producing more.
He said efforts to seal free trade agreements with the European Union, Canada, and Chile are signaling to pork and poultry producers the government’s intention to import more and pursue further trade liberalization.
“For the 3 million rice farmers, their incomes declined by an estimated P50 billion per year in real terms since the enactment of the Rice Tariffication Law in 2019,” Mr. Montemayor said.
Mr. Montemayor highlighted the continued intrusion of commercial fishing vessels into municipal waters legally reserved for municipal fisherfolk, an ongoing concern for the subsistence fishing sector.
“The Marcos Jr. administration and the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) are perceived as having fumbled the ball in protecting the exclusive rights of municipal fisherfolk,” Mr. Montemayor said, citing the stalled progress in the courts of the Mercidar Fishing Corp. case, which challenged the Fisheries Code’s designation of a 15-kilometer zone from the shoreline as closed to commercial fishing operations.
Mr. Montemayor said while he supports the signing of the New Agrarian Emancipation Act in 2023, which condoned the unpaid debt of agrarian reform beneficiaries, he said the Department of Agrarian Reform’s (DAR) has been slow to respond to illegal land conversions, stalled agrarian disputes and violence against activist farmers.
“The DAR has chosen to remain silent despite the clamor of landless farmers — pursuant to the constitutional provisions on agrarian reform and social justice — to be accorded a legal pathway to access and own land after the 2014 deadline under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program Extension with Reforms (CARPER) Law,” Mr. Montemayor said.
Mr. Montemayor noted that some commitments to the agriculture sector made in the preceding SONA (State of the Nation Address) remained unfulfilled, including cracking down on profiteering in the agricultural goods trade, the planting of 15 million coconut trees in 2025, and the approval of amendments to the Coconut Industry and Trust Fund Act of 2021.
