The country’s agriculture sector shrank by 1.7 percent in 2021 despite increased production in the last three months, mainly due to the 17 percent slump in the production of the livestock sector that continues to reel from the adverse effects of the African swine fever outbreak.
The good news is the meager growth of 0.6 percent of the agriculture output in the fourth quarter is the first time the sector posted a gain for the entire year and a reversal of the 3.8 percent decline in the same period of 2020.
The Department of Agriculture set an ambitious target to grow the sector by at least 2 percent in 2021 but the significant decline in livestock production proved too big to overcome, even if the country already had two long years to deal with the highly contagious ASF outbreak.
Chester Warren Tan, president of the National Federation of Hog Farmers, Inc., added that excessive importation pulled down the output of the livestock industry, particularly the hog subsector that is most affected by ASF.
Aside from our agriculture official’s crippling inability to deal with ASF, Typhoon Odette, the strongest typhoon to hit the country last year, also curbed output.
The growth in the fourth quarter is hopefully an indication that things are finally turning around and our agriculture sector is finally on the right track. Hopefully the meager growth wasn’t just a fluke and can be sustained by the millions of farmers, fishers, livestock and poultry raisers; with the help of a government that knows what it is doing and has proactive programs line up instead of simply waiting to react to the many disasters and catastrophes our nation is highly vulnerable to.
The 2-year problem of the ASF outbreak that our government cannot seem to get a handle on needs to be resolved as soon as possible with solutions more comprehensive and sustainable than importation which is not very helpful to local producers that continue to struggle. Having been one of the heaviest anchors to the sector’s growth, solving ASF will be key to the recovery and growth of this sector that ensures the nation’s food security and employs millions of mostly poor Filipinos.
Although the agriculture sector was expected to be largely impervious to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Philippines has been unable to grow it over the past two years. Do our agriculture officials have solutions that can extricate the country from this mess, or are they part of the problem?*
