The influential Makati Business Club (MBC), which represents the country’s top executives, is urging the government to implement sweeping institutional reforms in the agriculture sector, which it argues is essential to narrow the massive wealth gap between the rich and the poor.

Speaking at the MBC’s year-end review last week, Executive Director Rafael Ongpin said the business group is calling for serious changes in agriculture as part of its push for wealth redistribution.

Ongpin clarified that the MBC's concept of wealth redistribution is not "socialist" or about "taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor."

“We mean growing the pie at a rate where the poor, which is those below the poverty line and just above, their incomes grow at a faster rate and therefore enables them to move up into the middle class,” he said.

The current state of wealth distribution, he noted, is a pyramid where a “small economic elite has the majority of economic power, and then you’ve got a huge base that has tiny economic power.” This system is directly linked to the nation's “really flawed” agriculture sector.

Ongpin stated that the government must intervene to ensure that being a farmer—a group that constitutes one of the country’s poorest sectors—provides a viable path to the middle class.

One key reform he proposed is strengthening farmers’ role in the value chain by giving them sufficient assistance to generate value from their goods without “parasitic and even predatory middlemen.”

Karl Kendrick Chua, Ayala Corp. Managing Director and former Socioeconomic Planning Secretary, suggested the government should consider liberalizing critical crops.

Chua, a staunch defender of the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL), argued that easing tariffs on exports of other commodities would make agriculture “more productive.” While the RTL has been blamed for hurting farmers' livelihoods due to the influx of cheaper rice imports, Chua maintained the law is effective in boosting farmers’ productivity.

Under the RTL, revenues from imported rice tariffs are channeled to the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF), which provides farmers with farm machinery, rice seeds, and expanded credit assistance to improve their competitiveness.

Chua also suggested amending the current agrarian reform system to shift the focus from "equity to efficiency."

“So, farmers own their land, but they lease [it] back to farmer organizations and cooperatives. Then they get a share because they own a share in the operations of the farm,” he offered as an example of a potential model.

Ongpin told the Manila Bulletin that the MBC has already communicated its proposals to Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel.

“We have to make it profitable to be a farmer and ideally profitable enough so that they enter the middle class,” Ongpin concluded, emphasizing the need to “create a bigger pie and give the underprivileged a much bigger part of that pie.”