The country has secured more than $1 billion in official development assistance (ODA) financing for the development of the agriculture sector during the first year of the administration, the Department of Finance (DOF) said.
DOF Secretary Benjamin Diokno also said among the ODA financing was the $500 million loan agreement of the Philippines with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for the Competitive and Inclusive Agriculture Development Program (Subprogram 2), which aims to increase the competitiveness and inclusiveness of the agriculture sector.
Diokno added that the DOF also signed loan agreements with the World Bank (WB) worth $876 million to develop the agriculture and fisheries sectors.
The first loan deal with the WB was the Mindanao Inclusive Agriculture Development Project (MIADP), which aims to sustainably increase the agricultural productivity, resiliency, and accessibility to markets and services of organized farmers and fisherfolks in selected ancestral domains and for selected value chains in Mindanao, the official, quoted by reports, said.
The second loan financing was the Philippine Fisheries and Coastal Resiliency (FishCoRe) Project, which aims to improve fisheries management, enhance the value of fisheries production, and elevate incomes in selected coastal communities, while the third is the Philippine Rural Development Project (PRDP) Scale-Up, which aims to boost farmer and fisherfolk access to markets, increase income from selected agri-fishery value chains, and improve efficiency in the food supply chain, the DOF reported.
The finance chief said these projects are guided by the Philippine Development Plan (PDP) 2023-2028, which is a plan to reinvigorate job creation and accelerate poverty reduction by steering the economy back on a high-growth path.
President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., who is also the concurrent Secretary of the Department of Agriculture (DA), earlier said his administration is putting a premium on food security.
“This entails taking advantage of economies of scale in production, increasing infrastructure in the agriculture sector, and providing extended financing to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), farmers, and fisherfolks,” Diokno said.
The government aims to improve production efficiency through the adoption of modern technologies and infrastructure projects that support agricultural processes such as farm-to-market roads that aid the transport of farm inputs and products from farms to trading centers, according to the DOF chief.