Agriculture growth seen at below 3 percent in 2023

MANILA, Philippines — The agricultural sector is poised to have recorded modest growth below three percent last year, according to an official of the Department of Agriculture (DA).

“I have to check the numbers of PSA (Philippine Statistics Authority), but looking at the quarters, there is positive growth. But it’s not three to four percent, lower than three to four percent,” Agriculture Assistant Secretary and spokesperson Arnel de Mesa said in an interview yesterday.

De Mesa said livestock and poultry remained the growth drivers of the sector last year.

“In the third quarter, corn and sugar fell, but rice production remained high,” he said.

The agriculture official said the country is likely to have breached its production target for rice of 20 million metric tons last year.

“Based on the latest report, we can achieve 20 million metric tons,” he said, citing that production already reached 18.8 million MT in October 2023.

In December, the country’s agricultural output could grow in the fourth quarter of the year due to more favorable weather conditions, de Mesa said.

He noted favorable production in the country’s crops sector.

“We expect that the growth of the livestock and poultry sub sectors will continue and hopefully we can recover in the fisheries sector because in the third quarter, this was the subsector with the largest decline,” De Mesa said last month.

“We’re hoping that the sector will recover in the fourth quarter,” he said.

Latest data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that the country’s farm production declined by 0.3 percent in the third quarter, due to lower outputs in the crops and fisheries sector, marking the second consecutive quarter that farm production declined.

The value of agriculture and fisheries production stood at P412.41 billion from July to September.

The 0.3 percent decline was lower than the 1.2 percent drop in the second quarter, but a reversal of the 1.6 percent growth recorded in the same quarter last year.