PSA: Farm lands shrank in past decades

The size of the country’s agricultural or farm lands have shrunk over the past three decades, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said as it highlighted the need for a new round of large-scale government census of agriculture and fisheries to gather data to be used for the next 10 years.

During the launch of the 2022 Census of Agriculture and Fisheries (CAF), PSA chief and National Statistician Claire Dennis Mapa said, “We need to update our resources in terms of, for example, the size of our farm area… this [decade] 2022, relative to the previous decades.”

“We saw in the data that our farm areas have declined in terms of hectares,” Mapa said.

For example, the PSA chief said that in the 1980 CAF, the area of farm lands in the country totaled 9.73 million hectares.

In 2002, it shrunk to 9.67 million hectares and further trimmed to 7.27 million hectares based on the 2012 round of CAF, according to Mapa.

Likewise, data from Center for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (CARRD) showed that farm lands for rice—the country’s main staple—have shrunk by 48% since 1980.

Citing PSA data, CARRD said that from 3,649,882 hectares in 1980, rice lands all over the country have shrunk to 1,904,301 hectares in 2012, translating to a loss of up to 1.7 million hectares of rice lands blamed on land conversion and selling of farm lands to developers.

“So we need to update the information—number of hectares, farmlands, and average farm sizes natin, including who are the stakeholders in the agriculture and fisheries sector. We need to update to see the real situation on the ground,” Mapa said.

The PSA defines CAF as a large-scale government undertaking geared towards the collection and compilation of basic information on the agricultural and fishery sectors in the country.

The data to be collected in the census will serve as important bases of policies, plans, and programs for the country's socio-economic development.

The 2022 CAF is the seventh in a series of PSA’s decennial agricultural and fisheries census.

Data from CAF provide an inventory of agricultural and fishery resources, basic information on crops and livestock, statistics on land distribution and operations, benchmarks for measuring progress, data for local area planning, a sampling frame for surveys, information for monitoring progress towards Sustainable Development Goals, and data needed by United Nations organizations for international comparability and monitoring the global food situation.

The PSA chief said the agency has identified over 16,000 barangays for the census which will be conducted from September 4 until the end of October this year.

The results of the CAF are expected to be released by the first quarter of 2024.

“The amount of data we can see for this [census] would be enormous so it would be helpful to our policymakers,” Mapa said.

“Data we will gather would be used by our policymakers, researchers, and stakeholders to make decisions that lead to more sustainable practices, equitable distribution of resources, and policies that prioritize the improvement of agricultural and fisheries production processes as well as the well-being of those who feed our nation,” he said.

The PSA chief said the Statistics agency would be using computer-assisted personal interview, paper-and-pen personal interview, telephone interview, and will be using artificial intelligence and space satellite imagery for the 2022 CAF.—AOL, GMA Integrated News