Good news comes in threes
The best news I have read in years is that the government has agreed to distribute land to farmers for free as part of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.
Agriculture a must issue in 2016 presidential election
I am most interested in what the presidential candidates' agricultural policies are and so, presumably is the nation, because one of the main topics of the Comelec's first presidential debate (to be held in Cagayan de Oro) this month, is precisely agriculture.
Working for peanuts
Fructuosa Llana of Frux Food Products is a progressive entrepreneur. She recently started a promising line of snacks made from cassava flour and fortified with malunggay and other vegetables (grown in her own small garden). But her main business is still the peanut butter line she has been producing for more than a decade now....
Luizhan: small steps to farm efficiency
The village of Xiaogang was the birthplace of the first agricultural revolution in China. It was called the Household Responsibility System which allowed farmers to produce for sale in the market rather than for the collective and saw farm productivity soar. The Chinese leadership recognized what was already going on underground and legalized it.
Conjecture vs. evidence: a reiteration
[with Sharon F. Piza] This is a reply to RV Fabella’s methodological rejoinder to criticisms of his paper ‘CARP: time to let go’.
Time to let go — or not? (2)
CARP needs to be fully implemented, not killed. If every government program is to be scrapped because it has not performed according to target, we would have no education program, no Comelec —in fact, we should scrap the country’s entire medium-term development plan. Does that make sense?
On criticisms of ‘CARP: time to let go’: a methodological rejoinder
This rejoinder is written for a pedagogical purpose: this is a rare opportunity for our students current and past to learn from an actual methodological debate.
Time to let go — or not?
Yesterday, Raul Fabella of the University of the Philippines School of Economics and the National Academy of Science and Technology gave a lecture titled “Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP): Time to Let Go.” Note that it wasn’t a question, but a statement.
Time to let go of CARP? Not so fast
[with Sharon F. Piza] The following note seeks to clarify the appreciation of data pertaining to agrarian reform as used in the discussion paper “CARP: time to let go” (henceforth Fabella (2014)).
Intergenerational poverty and joblessness
Perennially bugging the national leadership and society at-large has been persisting poverty even during periods of economic growth appreciably higher than its long-term norm. It is intimately linked to joblessness which the Social Weather Stations (SWS) latest survey reported last February 11 at 25.2 percent for 2013.
Agrarian reform and economic development: ‘equity’ with efficiency
Land reform should strengthen property rights. But the experience is that it threatened these on a wide scale in agriculture. Thus, it has instead shaken the stability of property rights.
Focus on agrarian reform: how do we proceed next?
A central component of Philippine agricultural policy is tied up with the agrarian reform program. After many years of implementation, the program is nowhere near the objective that land reform in the country was set out to fulfill.
