Why our farmers, farm workers and fishermen are poor

ONE of our front page stories on Thursday is about the worldwide shortage of farm workers. In our country this is mainly because of bad governance—wrong policies for the agriculture sector (which for some statistical quirk includes the fishery sector) and massive corruption in government agencies in charge of agriculture. Both of these result in perpetuating the poverty of the farmers and fishermen and the low incomes of non-corporate agri-businessmen.

The neglect by the Aquino administration of the agriculture sector is indicated by the incredible untruthfulness and mental dishonesty of the few paragraphs President Benigno Aquino devoted to this largest sector of our political-economy.  Those paragraphs also reveal how small the agriculture sector is in the President’s mind and how incompetent he and his officials must be in farming matters—or how unconcerned they are with the millions of Filipinos in this sector and in the rural areas.