Why Philippine agriculture fails

Despite accounting for more than a third of the country’s workforce the sector contributes less than 15 percent of the total economic output. Poverty incidence among agricultural families is, as a result, much higher than the national average; not only does this impose significant social costs, it reduces productivity.
This, in turn, makes agriculture an unattractive sector to invest in for both agribusiness investors and individuals; because of the rather poor existence farming offers, many potential second- or third-generation farmers instead look for income in urban areas or overseas.
An example of why the Philippines fails in agriculture is the most recent installment of the long-running feud between the government and coconut farmers over the handling of the bloated, Marcos-era Coconut Levy Fund, now worth some P71 billion. In the latest drama, the Confederation of Coconut Farmers Organizations of the Philippines (CCFOP) last week filed a petition at the Supreme Court to block implementation of two executive orders issued by President B.S. Aquino 3rd. One (EO 179) orders an inventory of the coco levy deposits and assets as preparation for privatizing them, while the second (EO 180) authorizes the use of the funds for the benefit of coconut farmers.
The CCFOP would certainly disagree, but the details of their complaint with this pair of directives are not really important; not when wrangling over the coco levy funds has been going on for three decades. The fund was ostensibly created as a way to bankroll coconut sector development, but turned into a slush fund for those during the Marcos era who were well connected to politics but perhaps not so much to ethics.
With proper ownership of the fund finally established (it belongs in full to coconut farmers, under stewardship of the government), one would presume the active