The Philippines’ Agrarian Apocalypse: Marcos Jr.’s Policies Torch Farmer Livelihoods

By Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo — June 10, 2025

THE Philippines’ unemployment crisis isn’t an accident; it’s a policy choice. When President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. slashed rice import tariffs from 35% to 15% in 2024, he promised cheaper food for 120 million Filipinos. Instead, he gutted the livelihoods of 483,000 rice farmers—families like Leosa Bonifacio’s, who now pawns her sewing machine to buy insulin for her son. The government’s myopic focus on urban consumer prices has ignited a slow-burning agrarian collapse, and the Marcos administration’s claims of “economic resilience” ring hollow against a stark reality: 2.06 million jobless Filipinos in April 2025, with 609,000 agricultural jobs lost in a single year. These numbers represent families who now skip meals to repay loans, children pulled from school to work, and a countryside teetering on the edge of despair.

Unmasking The Roots: A System Designed To Fail Farmers

The surge in unemployment—up from 1.93 million in March 2024 to 2.06 million in April 2025—exposes a deeper rot in the Philippine economy. Agriculture, a sector employing roughly a quarter of the nation’s 49.7 million workers, grew a measly 1.2% in 2023, lagging behind the population’s 1.4% expansion rate. The Marcos administration celebrates this as progress, yet the math betrays them: food production can’t keep pace with mouths to feed. The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) rightly calls this a “bleeding out” of agriculture, not a skills mismatch as officials conveniently claim. Blaming workers for lacking skills sidesteps the real culprits: stagnant wages—often as low as ₱300 a day, barely $5—suffocating costs of seeds and fertilizers, and a gut-punch from rice tariff cuts that flood markets with cheap imports, dropping palay prices to a ruinous ₱15 per kilo.

Power dynamics scream injustice. Urban consumers, a vocal voting bloc, enjoy cheaper rice, while rural farmers—historically landless and poor—bear the brunt. The 2019 Rice Tariffication Law, carried forward by Marcos Jr., dismantled protections like the National Food Authority’s control, prioritizing importers and urban wallets over the 30% of farmers already mired in poverty, per PIDS data. Rural infrastructure, promised as a lifeline, remains a mirage: farm-to-market roads are patchy, irrigation covers only 31,548 hectares of the needed millions, and the ₱17.3 billion allocated in 2024 barely scratches the surface. This isn’t resilience; it’s a rigged game where the rural poor lose every round.

Faces Of The Fallout: Lives Shattered Beyond The Numbers

Behind the 483,000 lost rice farming jobs are stories like Leosa Bonifacio’s, a 45-year-old widow in Nueva Ecija. Once earning ₱10,000 a season, she now faces debts from high fertilizer costs and a market glutted by Vietnamese rice. Her teenage daughter, Ana, dropped out of school to hawk vegetables, a grim echo of the 2008 rice price crisis when soaring costs and import reliance left farmers reeling. Then, as now, families cut meals, sold assets, and watched malnutrition creep in—UNICEF notes rural school dropout rates climb as high as 20% in such times. These numbers aren’t just statistics; they’re a slow-motion tragedy of debt cycles, hunger, and lost futures.

Band-aids On A Broken System: Marcos Jr.’s Policy Fiasco

The Marcos administration’s response feels like applying bandaids to a hemorrhage—visible effort, futile results. The Agri-Puhunan Program, launched in September 2024, promises low-cost credit and market support for 1.2 million hectares of rice land. A farmer like Leosa might net ₱58,000 per hectare, with ₱32,000 as a subsistence allowance. But who benefits? The program leans on cooperatives under the National Irrigation Administration, often tied to entrenched local elites, leaving smallholders—70% of whom till less than two hectares—scrambling for scraps. The ₱197.84 billion 2024 agriculture budget sounds robust, a 6% bump from 2023, yet it’s diluted across rice, corn, livestock, and fisheries, with no clear tally of how much trickles to the fields versus bureaucratic pockets.

The irony burns: Marcos Jr. champions food security while leaning on imports that kneecap local production. Rice imports dropped from 3.8 million to 3.5 million metric tons in 2023, a minor win, but the 15% tariff still undercuts farmers, whose yields average 4 metric tons per hectare nationally—far below Nueva Ecija’s 6 tons, a benchmark of what’s possible with real support. Subsidies for seeds and fertilizers exist, but distribution lags, and high costs persist. The Build Better More infrastructure push, while ambitious, moves too slowly to absorb displaced rural labor now.

Blueprint To Break The Cycle: Bold Fixes For A Dying Sector

Immediate relief is urgent.

Subsidize Inputs Now: Channel funds to slash seed and fertilizer costs, lifting palay prices above the ₱15/kg threshold to keep farmers afloat.
Emergency Jobs Surge: Ramp up Build Better More—farm-to-market roads, irrigation—to hire the 609,000 jobless, targeting rural zones like Nueva Ecija and Pampanga.

Long-term, structural fixes are non-negotiable.

Land Consolidation Revolution: Push cooperative farming to scale up yields—Nueva Ecija’s 6 metric tons per hectare shows the potential—pooling resources for mechanization and bargaining power.
Tariff Rebalancing Act: Adopt a sliding-scale model—30% during harvest to shield farmers, 15% in lean months for consumers—to strike a balance.
Governance Overhaul: Seat farmers on Department of Agriculture boards to counter urban bias and ensure policies reflect field realities, not Manila’s boardrooms.

Countdown To Chaos: The Looming Cost Of Inaction

Ignore this, and the fallout deepens. Farmer despair fuels unrest—Negros, a sugar and rice hub, already sees New People’s Army recruitment tick up as hope fades. Generational harm looms: UNICEF data flags rural dropout rates spiking, pushing kids into informal work—street vending, scavenging—robbing them of education and locking in poverty. A nation that bets its food security on imports risks hunger when global supply chains falter, as 2022’s Ukraine crisis showed.

This isn’t just about economics; it’s about whether a nation chooses to feed its people today while starving its future. The Marcos administration must act—subsidize, employ, reform—or watch the countryside crumble, taking millions of lives and dreams with it.