Agriculture confronts several challenges over the decade, i.e., meeting burgeoning food requirements with limited farm land, and balancing the need to import with the provision of livelihoods. The current policy regime leans heavily toward import substitution, with supply side interventions to...

This paper argues that the development of the rural economy is a key factor for achieving inclusive growth, one that creates jobs, draws the majority into the economic and social mainstream, and continuously reduces mass poverty. Employment conditions in Philippine rural labor markets and...

Expenditures on agriculture have been rising over time, as expression of the state's commitment to reduce poverty, raise rural incomes and household welfare, and promote food security. However, agriculture continues to exhibit disappointing performance, namely, laggard growth, lack of...

Linking small farmers to modern markets, whether domestically or for export, increasingly entails participation in modern supply chains coordinated by contract farming. Concerns have been raised regarding the possible disadvantages from contract farming facing small farmers. Most empirical work...

The Philippines has made considerable progress in attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However achieving all the targets remains a daunting challenge, with goals for poverty, education and maternal mortality unlikely to be attained by 2015. Focus has now shifted to informing the...

Recently, the agricultural sector in the Philippines has enjoyed robust growth driven by rapid price increases in key subsectors, namely, rubber, sugarcane, and coconut. The largest subsectors, however, namely, rice and corn, relatively experienced slower growth and exhibited lower...

Fertilizer policy in the country has evolved from pervasive interventionism in the 1970s to today's market-oriented regime. Government has abandoned price policies and subsidies, focusing rather on standard-setting, quality regulation, and training. Over the same period domestic demand for...

For the Philippines, quantitative policy analysis should incorporate regional differences in welfare and economic structure, which arise partly from geographic constraints. However, existing CGE models offer limited analysis of regional effects or national impacts of region-specific...

Inadequate application of nitrogen (N) fertilizer has been identified by the Food Staples Sufficiency Program as a major constraint in achieving rice self-sufficiency. The available literature on fertilizer application in the Philippines tends to find inadequate N application under the agronomic...

Inclusive business (IB) is a private sector approach to providing goods, services, and livelihoods on a commercially viable basis, either at scale or scalable, to people at the base of the pyramid by making them part of the value chain of companies' core business as suppliers, distributors,...