The World Bank has released an initial $248 million, or over ₱15 billion, from its $1-billion financing for the Philippines to jumpstart the government’s ambitious agriculture modernization program aimed at boosting food production, strengthening climate resilience, and modernizing food supply chains.

In a July 15 implementation status and results report, the Washington-based multilateral lender said the advance was provided to the Philippine government after the Philippines Sustainable Agriculture Transformation (PSAT) Program became effective last month, allowing implementation to formally begin.

The World Bank said priority activities are now being initiated, including the recruitment of independent verification agencies that will validate the achievement of disbursement-linked indicators (DLIs), as well as the implementation of the program action plan (PAP).

The lender rated both progress toward achieving the program’s development objective (PDO) and overall implementation progress as “satisfactory,” while assigning an overall risk rating of “substantial.”

To date, $240.15 million, equivalent to 24.88 percent of the effective loan amount of $965.21 million after financing adjustments, has been disbursed. This loan was approved last March 27, signed last May 14, became effective last June 11, and will remain open until Dec. 31, 2030.

This $1-billion financing is among the biggest World Bank loans obtained by the Philippines, and the largest extended to the Philippine agriculture sector.

The loan, denominated in Japanese yen, will be repaid until 2044 under the World Bank’s Program-for-Results (PforR) financing instrument, which links succeeding disbursements to the achievement of specific development targets instead of merely financing expenditures.

Implemented by the Department of Agriculture (DA), PSAT seeks to improve productivity, diversification, climate resilience, and the efficient use of public resources across the country’s agrifood systems.

The program aims to expand climate-smart rice farming through wider adoption of improved seed varieties, greater mechanization, fertilizer support reforms, and climate-resilient technologies. It will also invest in higher-value crops, cold storage facilities, food safety and plant quarantine laboratories, as well as institutional reforms such as procurement improvements, multi-year budgeting, and the establishment of an integrated data command center to support policymaking as well as disaster response.

Under the program’s performance framework, the government targets increasing rice yields in Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Program (RCEP) areas from 4.11 metric tons (MT) to 4.7 MT by 2030, diversifying rice production areas to 1.89 million hectares (ha), expanding the adoption of climate-smart agriculture technologies to 300,000 farmers, and increasing the number of DA programs implemented through expenditure-efficient, multi-year results-based budgeting from zero to five.

Other targets include processing 105,520 cubic meters of perishable agricultural products through new cold storage facilities, upgrading 10 food safety and plant quarantine laboratories for agricultural exports, improving DA budget utilization to 80 percent, integrating 30 datasets into a centralized agricultural command center, as well as increasing procurement efficiency and transparency by 40 percent before the program closes by end-2030.