depicted the hardships faced by Filipino farmers. Some scholars said the lyrics of the Tagalog song referred to rice cultivation, with farmers bending over and being submerged in flooded fields for hours to plant their crop.
While technology has grown by leaps and bounds, the Philippines remains unable to maximize the advantages presented by these developments to significantly raise agricultural output. Based on official government data, the sector’s contribution to gross domestic output—the sum of all goods and services produced within a country’s borders—has been shrinking in recent years.
This may have been in the minds of policymakers, particularly those in the Department of Agriculture, which recently declared that it will embrace “innovative farming methods.” The business-as-usual scenario is no longer feasible and will not help the cause of the administration to increase food production and enable the country to achieve food security.
Apart from investing in mechanization, farm-to-market road and other postharvest facilities, the state should consider looking into other initiatives that would change the perception about agriculture that it entails backbreaking labor for little remuneration.
Malaysian firm SD Guthrie has started using machines to take over non-harvesting jobs like spraying pesticide or monitoring fruit and yields. Another plus for its automation push is that women were encouraged to join a traditionally male-dominated workforce, as the robots help with backbreaking tasks like lifting 30-kilogram fruit bunches and loading them into trucks.