Philippines Food Security

III. Food Security Situation in the Philippines with Regards to Poverty After the food crisis of 2008, the international organizations as well as the local government of many countries have been prioritizing food security as a development agenda, based on Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) definition of food security, “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” This paper targets food security from macro down to the micro level with the focus on how the agricultural sector of the country participates in finding a solution to sustainable development. The

At present Philippine farmers still rely on Carabao’s in irrigating their lands. Philippines is also unable to provide the required food production quota in effect this raises the price of food commodities, rice shortage is then an impact of the inflation due to the food production shortage, it also impacts the poor who cannot afford it when half of their salary goes to food, with this, rice shortage then becomes an issue of food security. The Agriculture Sector of the Philippines is yet to be modernized and thus the issue of food security still persists. In other countries, farming is done by computer-controlled and GPS positioned tractors, Thailand benefited from what they learned from our International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) while majority of Philippine farmers never heard of the flood-resistant variety of rice developed by that institute there is also the Hybrid Rice Production that Philippines introduced to Papua New Guinea to help in their rice production, Philippines must develop its own

Addressing this problem is one of the most important policy challenges the country is currently facing. There are quite a number of proposals in solving poverty as a problem and till today it is still continuously increasing, some views blame economy as the reason for poverty. According to Arsenio M. Balisacan (1997), the contention is that the root of the problem is simply the lack of economic growth, putting the economy on a high-growth path is thus prescribed as all that is needed to solve the problem of poverty. He also emphasized that other proposals treat poverty as purely a concrete manifestation of gross economic and social inequities. Redistribution of wealth and opportunities then becomes the key to solving poverty. A variant of such proposals holds that economic growth does not at all benefit the poor. Focusing on growth rather than on redistributive reforms is seen to exacerbate inequities, which could lead to further wearing down of peace and social stability. There are also some that consider economic growth as a necessary condition for poverty reduction and recognize that reform measures have to be put in place to enable the poor to participate in growth processes. For other groups, pro-poor growth requires nothing less than