Last week, I wrote about my conversation with Dr. Julian Gonsalves, Senior Asia Program Advisor at the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), an international organization focusing on rural development, on the benefits of smallholder farms, who identified the opportunities these farmers, who make up most of Philippine agriculture, have over their bigger counterparts.

In this installment, we discuss his observations on the biggest challenges Filipino smallholder farmers face and what, in his experience, has been the most effective way to de-risk smallholder farming in the Philippines.

When asked what, in his decades of working in Philippine agriculture, he thought the biggest challenges small farmers faced were, he had several answers, some of which might ruffle feathers:

First is a reliance on importation. “...the biggest challenge the Philippines has is the high cost of production inputs. This is a challenge because some of the agricultural inputs have to be imported, so the production cost is higher in the Philippines.”

Then there is Mother Nature. “It's possible that Filipino farmers are affected by natural disasters more than any other Southeast Asian country, and therefore, there is a tendency for farmers to be very wary of making investments, and this is where maybe insurance might help.”

There are also geographic limitations. “The Philippines is also greatly limited, like Indonesia, by the lack of cross-border freedom. Cross-border trade offers marketing opportunities that the Philippines does not have.”

He also warned about the challenge of elite capture, where public resources are (unintentionally) made available only to a select few. An example of this could be small farmers not having access to government programs because they don’t know how to fill out grant applications. This can be alleviated by “targeting social groups, targeting geographic areas, and achieving scale by design.”

And perhaps the hardest to hear, an overreliance on just a few crops. “When it comes to agriculture, a reliance on rice and corn might not be the best.”

How does he think we can de-risk Philippine agriculture? In a country populated by small farmers, integrated farming may hold a key. “The idea of relying more on trees, more on livestock, and less on annual crops is a way forward.”

Many government agencies back this up. Gonsalves specifically mentions DA-Region IV’s continuous support of IIRR and Region IV LGUs' various agricultural activities, particularly in agroecology-based rice farming. “The Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) is now promoting integrated farming systems. PhilRice and the Department of Agriculture (DA) are promoting agroecology. Trees are an important component of agriculture as you go forward.”

Things are not all bleak, however. “The Philippines has an advantage over the other countries that I know of in Southeast Asia in that it has a strong local government presence and effective disbursement of DA funding at the local level. Most municipalities have access to DA funding if they know how to write proposals and can demonstrate the capacity to implement. I think this is something that you may not find in all the other countries.”

In an Asia where the wealth gap continues to widen, both national and local governments must continually make the choice to work with the poor. “[This] means targeting geographic areas where they predominate, like remote municipalities [and] Indigenous People... in order to ensure that benefits accrue to areas that have been neglected, and within these groups, ensuring certain social groups have access to these services. The poorest people are poorly organized and may need assistance.”

This means developing robust programs for social protection in agriculture. ”...not just from the perspective of the ayuda or subsidies, but also from the perspective of improving their access to credit and facilities,” Gonsalves said. “...the Philippines would benefit by being more inclusive, [meaning] equitable in ensuring that more people benefit in each of the communities… But in order to be inclusive and equitable, which you do see in some other South Asian countries… the majority of farmers [should be] eligible for services… I'm not talking about subsidies per se, but agricultural credit facilities: banking that supports smallholders.”

There must be concrete social evidence that working in agriculture means making good money. “If you don't do that, people are going to exit agriculture, and there's no doubt that some of the main reasons why people are exiting from agriculture are because they are not able to break out of the cycle of poverty,” he said. “And in my view, breaking out of the cycle of poverty is a function of having access to resources, whether they are natural assets, their land, or what.”

If we want to keep our farmers on the farm, they have to equate farming with thriving in life, and one way to do this is to offer them equitable support.