Reelectionist Senator Juan Edgardo “Sonny Angara” on Tuesday renewed his call for more young people to engage in agriculture, saying the sector should look for creative ways to engage them in farming.
Angara said this will help ensure that there would be enough farmers to feed the country’s ever-growing population.
“Youth engagement in agriculture is vital to ensuring that the Philippines will not have a scarcity of future food producers,” said Angara.
Angara, who is running for another six year term in the Senate, is scheduled to campaign in Cagayan, one of the country’s top rice and corn producing provinces.
Angara issued the call as the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Cagayan actively promotes its “Young Hands in Agriculture” program in an attempt to encourage young people to venture into farming through its “Young Hands in Agriculture.”
The program aims to encourage the youth to get involved in food production amid the decreasing and ageing population of farmers in the province.
According to Angara, the government and other industry stakeholders should work harder to convince the young generation to choose farming as a profession given the waning interest in agriculture among the youth.
“Making agriculture attractive and an easy sell to the youth should be among the top priorities for the government in order to help the country achieve inclusive growth and food security,” said the lawmaker who is running under the platform “Alagang Angara.”
Angara said he believes there is still room for improvement in terms of support services to change the state of agriculture and make farming appealing as a career.
“The seeming lack of government support to the agriculture sector is one of the most compelling reasons why we find it so hard to encourage young people to consider farming as a career, and why farmers and farm workers are leaving the field for better paying jobs,” Angara pointed out.
Angara noted that the waning interest in agriculture among the youth was evident in the sharp decline of enrollees in agriculture courses from 2015 to 2018.
The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) reported that 142,182 students enrolled in various institutions offering agricultural courses all over the country for school year 2015-2016. But enrollment fell to 127,287 for school year 2016-217 and further went down to 100,922 for 2017-2018.
Angara said many young farmers are leaving the field to work elsewhere as indicated in the January 2019 Labor Force Survey conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
The same survey results also showed that the agriculture sector suffered 1.7 million job losses, which overshadowed the combined 1.3 million additional jobs in industry and services sectors.
The PSA said the agriculture sector currently employs 9.158 million individuals. The average daily wage of agriculture workers is P265, according to a study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies or PIDS.
