House Bill No. 10324, or the proposed “Philippine Agricultural High School System Act of 2024,” aims to create secondary schools on farming in each of the country’s regions, in order to boost productivity and technology dissemination in the country’s neglected agricultural sector.
“One way to increase the capacity of the country for agriculture is to promote agricultural education as early as in secondary school,” said Cavite Rep. Aniela Bianca Tolentino, a niece of Senator Francis Tolentino, who has also made a similar proposal in the Senate, which is Republic Act. No. 10618, or the “Rural Farm Schools Act,” which tasks the Department of Education to encourage the creation of at least one public rural farm school in every province.
According to the younger Tolentino, a new agricultural high school system could add focus to the farming sector by integrating already existing farming schools and hasten technology transfer, especially in areas with little state university assistance.
She cited World Bank data which showed that the Philippine agriculture sector employs 23 percent of the workforce, but national food security is now threatened due to years of neglect.
The PAHS system would be placed under the joint supervision of the Department of Agriculture and DepEd which would prescribe the guidelines and policies on the operation and management of agricultural schools as well as basic curricular content to ensure their credibility and academic integrity.
It sought funding of P500 million to be used in establishing and organizing the school system and subsequent funding would be included as a separate item in the DA budget.
As a country where agriculture has a lot of potential to be a lynchpin in the economy, as well as food security, the sector has been woefully supported and even outright threatened with importation policies. The initiative to build a farm school system all over the country may be well intentioned, but can only be effective if anyone who wants to get into agriculture can be convinced by government’s actions and long term policies that the sector still has a future, because what good is advancing education in agriculture if government has no long term plans for it anyway, and would rather prop up the importers?*
