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 maintain up with the rising population.
FFF Chairman and former Agriculture Secretary Leonardo Q. Montemayor said in a press release that each agriculture and fisheries sectors remained stagnant relative to the population’s 1% growth rate, although 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 goal.
He also noted the overreliance on imports to fulfill increasing consumer demand, saying that the country has imported around 30% of its rice requirements since 2022, against lower than 10% a decade ago.
“Today, the country has the dubious distinction of being the largest rice importer on the earth,” Mr. Montemayor said.
Mr. Montemayor said tariff reductions and the resulting growth of imports following the issuance of Executive Order No. 62 didn’t 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 federal government’s intention to import more and pursue further trade liberalization.
“For the three million rice farmers, their incomes declined by an estimated P50 billion per 12 months in real terms because the enactment of the Rice Tariffication Law in 2019,” Mr. Montemayor said.
Mr. Montemayor highlighted the continued intrusion of business 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 within 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 industrial fishing operations.
Mr. Montemayor said while he supports the signing of the Recent 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 reply to illegal land conversions, stalled agrarian disputes and violence against activist farmers.
“The DAR has chosen to stay 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 within the preceding SONA (State of the Nation Address) remained unfulfilled, including cracking down on profiteering within 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.