Filipino farmers need government support to prepare for the influx of duty-free commodities, as the Asean Economic Community came into force on Dec. 31, Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala said Friday.
Alcala made the statement in the context of the Asean Economic Community, which was formally launched at the end of 2015.
AEC is an EU-inspired economic bloc that removed import duties across the borders of 10-member countries of Asean, including Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
The ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations said AEC combined the economic force of a resource-rich and growing market of more than 600 million people.
Alcala said targeted interventions should be made in order to enhance the capacity of Filipino farmers to compete and to expand their engagement in agribusiness opportunities.
Alcala commended the experts and researchers from both the International Rice Research Institute and Philippine Rice Research Institute for the success of the landmark comparative study on Philippine rice production with other rice producing countries in Asia.
Results of the project of PhilRice and IRRI were presented along with the launching of the country monographs reporting on each of the six countries covered, after over a decade.
Prior to the study, analysis of competitiveness was often limited to comparing published statistics like free on board rice prices of exporting countries.
Alcala said while these numbers were important, they needed to be contextualized to include production subsidies as well as short-term market conditions.
Alcala said the IRRI-PhilRice study provided inputs that allowed analysis of factors critical to understanding basic competitiveness, including the various production cost factors and practices, levels of subsidy, farming systems and marketing practices in the rice industry of other countries.
“The areas of irrigation, credit and insurance are factors on which Philippine rice sector can improve on as well as the need to address the increasing cost of farm labor through mechanization as the study compared levels of mechanization across countries,” Alcala said.