OUTSIDE of raising land ownership ceiling or allowing the land market to work again, the only way our agriculture sector will have a chance of developing is to cluster and consolidate the lands tilled by our small-scale farmers.

Adamopoulus and Restuccia (2019) revealed that the prolonged implementation of agrarian reform resulted in the decrease of farm sizes by 34 percent. No wonder that the average land size cultivated by Filipino farmers is around a hectare. As a result, the two authors noted that Philippine agricultural productivity declined by 17 percent because no economies of scale could be achieved with these miniscule farm sizes.