essay about rice farmers in the philippines

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The cultural significance of rice in the philippines: my journey to understanding rice.

Helena Wehmeyer (ELP 2021) | Affiliate PhD Research Scholar and Research Assistant , International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Switzerland

My journey to understanding rice started in 2017 when I moved to the Philippines and started my PhD in Geography at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Originally from Switzerland with Italian roots, rice was not a very regular staple for me and rather an occasional food, generally as a risotto. This changed as soon as I arrived in Los Baños. My colleagues taught me that rice would not only consume most of my studies, but also become one of my staples in cooking, baking, and, of course, eating out. They gave me the opportunity to delve into the cultural importance and culinary diversity of rice during my time in the Philippines.

Filipino cuisine is perfectly aligned to serve rice at every meal. Rice is eaten at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My personal favorite is a steamy arroz caldo, also known as congee, for breakfast. In addition, desserts and snacks also often include rice. Hence, its prevalence demonstrates its cultural significance. In this country, where many struggle with food insecurity and malnutrition is widespread, it generally remains the central portion of the dish and calorie provider. Nevertheless, a large dependence on rice can lead to multiple challenges. Health issues related to an unbalanced diet and low nutrients are associated with high rice consumption, especially white rice. Food security policies still strongly focus on rice. They aim to achieve rice self-sufficiency, but the Philippines is still a net rice importer due to stagnating yields (Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP) 2013). In addition, the effects of climate change are becoming more challenging and directly influence rice production. Farmers are some of the most directly affected in the rice value chain.

wehmeyer2.jpg

Filipino rice farmers are trying to cope with increased environmental, social, and economic pressure. Although more than two-thirds of the rice cultivation area in the Philippines is irrigated and many farmers use modern varieties, such as hybrid rice varieties or high-yielding varieties, yields are significantly lower compared to neighboring countries (GRiSP, 2013). At IRRI and in collaboration with the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), efforts are made to improve rice farmers’ situation. The introduction of new varieties to reduce yield gaps and increase farmers’ profitability is a key focus. In addition, promoting the use of good-quality seeds and improving mechanization is central. One project at IRRI, supported by the Department of Agriculture of the Philippines, also centers on less favorable rice cultivation areas (IRRI 2015). The heirloom rice project intends to enrich the legacy of traditional rice through empowered communities in unfavorable rice-based ecosystems. The main objective not only concentrates on enhancing productivity, but also promotes traditional rice cultivation practices and rice’s cultural importance throughout the country.

During my time at IRRI, I have been able to find out about the diversity of rice-related aspects that influence millions and feed billions. The most important lesson that I have learned is that rice is the foundation for a cultural and culinary understanding that goes beyond being a simple side dish. It is the livelihood basis for millions of smallholders in the Philippines and the world. It is a highly variable and adaptable crop that can grow in various climates and be cultivated under different practices. Furthermore, it is a food that connects people and allows them to share their favorite way of preparing or eating rice. The Filipino rice specialty that I will miss the most is bibingka, a sumptuously sweet and soft rice cake that contains a hint of coconut milk.

wehmeyer3.jpg

Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP) (2013): Rice Almanac. 4th Edition. International Rice Research Institute, Los Baños. URL: http://books.irri.org/9789712203008_content.pdf (accessed 20.09.2021)

International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) (2015): The DA-IRRI Heirloom Rice Project. http://books.irri.org/Heirloom_brochure.pdf (accessed 20.09.2021)

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• Review Article
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• Published: 14 October 2022

Two decades of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines: A systematic review and research agenda for the social sciences

• Ginbert P. Cuaton   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5902-3173 1 &
• Laurence L. Delina   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8637-4609 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  9 , Article number:  372 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Development studies
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While rice studies are abundant, they usually focus on macro-level rice production and yield data, genetic diversity, cultivar varieties, and agrotechnological innovations. Moreover, many of these studies are either region-wide or concentrated on countries in the Global North. Collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing the different themes and topic areas in rice research since the beginning of the 21st century, especially in the Global South, remain unaddressed areas. This study contributes to filling these research lacunae by systematically reviewing 2243 rice-related articles cumulatively written by more than 6000 authors and published in over 900 scientific journals. Using the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this study screened and retrieved articles published from 2001 to 2021 on the various topics and questions surrounding rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines—two rice-producing and -consuming, as well as emerging economies in Southeast Asia. Using a combination of bibliometrics and quantitative content analysis, this paper discusses the productive, relevant, and influential rice scholars; key institutions, including affiliations, countries, and funders; important articles and journals; and knowledge hotspots in these two countries. It also discusses the contributions of the social sciences, highlights key gaps, and provides a research agenda across six interdisciplinary areas for future studies. This paper mainly argues that an interdisciplinary and comparative inquiry of potentially novel topic areas and research questions could deepen and widen scholarly interests beyond conventional natural science-informed rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines. Finally, this paper serves other researchers in their review of other crops in broader global agriculture.

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Introduction.

Rice feeds the majority of the world’s population and employs millions, especially in developing countries in the Global South (Muthayya et al., 2014 ). Rice consumption has increased globally over the last decade. Statista data show that, in the cropping year 2020/2021, the world population consumed about 504.3 million metric tons of rice, increasing from 437.18 million metric tons in 2008/2009 (Shabandeh, 2021 ). These data highlight the crop’s global contribution and importance, especially in realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the blueprint for global prosperity (Gil et al., 2019 ). The SDGs call for systems transformation, including in agriculture, guided by the principles of sustainability and equity, driven by the leave-no-one-behind aphorism, to address the root causes of perennial poverty and chronic hunger.

Pathologist M. B. Waite ( 1915 ) pointed out that the apparent indicator of progress in modern agriculture is the application of scientific research and the subsequent modification and improvement of farming systems based on those research. For example, the Green Revolution resulted in increased agricultural production in developing countries due to the transfer of agrotechnological innovations from countries in the Global North to countries in the Global South. Although, we acknowledge that this project came with a cost (Glaeser, 2010 ; Pielke and Linnér, 2019 ; Pingali, 2012 ).

Regional rice studies have proliferated in Europe (Ferrero and Nguyen, 2004 ; Kraehmer et al., 2017 ), the Americas (Singh et al., 2017 ), Africa (Zenna et al., 2017 ), the Asia Pacific (Papademetriou et al., 2000 ), and South Asia (John and Fielding, 2014 ). Country studies on rice production have also emerged in Australia (Bajwa and Chauhan, 2017 ), China (Peng et al., 2009 ), and India (Mahajan et al., 2017 ). Scholars have also systematically reviewed rice’s phytochemical and therapeutic potentials (Sen et al., 2020 ), quality improvements (Prom-u-thai and Rerkasem, 2020 ), and its role in alleviating the effects of chronic diseases and malnutrition (Dipti et al., 2012 ).

These extant studies, however, are limited on at least three fronts. First, their foci were on rice production, yield, and operational practices and challenges at the macro level. Second, there have been zero attempts at synthesizing this corpus since the 21st century. Third, there are also no attempts at examining the various rice research areas that scholars, institutions, and countries need to focus on, especially in developing country contexts, and their nexuses with the social sciences. This paper addresses these gaps by unpacking and synthesizing multiple rice studies conducted in the emerging Southeast Asian economies of Indonesia and the Philippines from 2001 to 2021. A focus on these developing countries matters since they are home to over 35 million rice farmers (IRRI, 2013 ).

We conducted our review from the Scopus database, using a combination of bibliometric and quantitative content analyses. Section “Results and discussions” reports our results, where we discuss (1) the most relevant and influential rice scholars and their collaboration networks; (2) the most rice research productive institutions, including author affiliations, their countries, and their research funders; and (3) the most significant articles and journals in rice research. This section also identifies 11 topic areas belonging to four major themes of importance for rice research in the two countries. Section “Contributions from and research agenda for the social sciences” provides a research agenda, where we identify and discuss the contributions of our review in terms of future work. Despite the preponderance of rice research in the last two decades and more in Indonesia and the Philippines, contributions from the social sciences remain marginal. Thus, in the section “Conclusion”, we conclude that emphasis is needed on expanding and maximizing the contributions of social scientists given the many opportunities available, especially for conducting interdisciplinary and comparative rice research in these Southeast Asian countries.

Review methods and analytical approach

We used bibliometric and quantitative content analyses to systematically categorize and analyze more than two decades of academic literature on rice in Indonesia and the Philippines. Bibliometric methods, also known as bibliometrics, have grown to be influential in evaluating various research fields and topic areas. Bibliometrics mushroomed because of the increasing availability of online databases and new or improved analysis software (Dominko and Verbič, 2019 ). Bibliometrics quantitatively and statistically analyze research articles using their bibliographic data, such as authors, affiliations, funders, abstracts, titles, and keywords. These data are analyzed to identify and assess the development, maturity, research hotspots, knowledge gaps, and research trends (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017 ). For example, bibliometrics have been used in reviewing hydrological modeling methods (Addor and Melsen, 2019 ), business and public administration (Cuccurullo et al., 2016 ), and animals’ cognition and behavior (Aria et al., 2021 ).

This review article used bibliometrix , a machine-assisted program that offers multiple options and flexibility to map the literature comprehensively (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017 ). We run this program using R Studio version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01; “Bird Hippie”) for its source code readability, understandability, and easy-to-do computer programming (Cuaton et al., 2021 ). We used bibliometrix in three critical analytical phases: (a) importing and converting data to R format, (b) identifying our dataset’s collaboration networks and intellectual and conceptual structures, and (c) processing, presenting, and analyzing our dataset. Bibliometrix, however, is unable to produce specific data that we want to highlight in this paper; examples of these are our coding criteria on interdisciplinarity and author gender, where such information was not captured in the articles’ bibliographic data in Scopus. We addressed these issues by conducting a quantitative content analysis (QCA) of our dataset. QCA is a method to record, categorize, and analyze textual, visual, or aural materials (Coe and Scacco, 2017 ). QCA has been applied in other reviews, such as in energy research development in the social sciences (Sovacool, 2014 ), the concepts of energy justice (Jenkins et al., 2021 ), and in examining agricultural issues in Botswana (Oladele and Boago, 2011 ) and Bangladesh (Khatun et al., 2021 ).

Search strategies

We constructed our dataset from the Scopus database, which we accessed via our institution’s online library on 14 November 2021. Scopus is a scientific database established in 2004 and owned by Elsevier Ltd. (Elsevier, 2021 ). We excluded other databases, such as Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, and EBSCO, suggesting one potential bias in our review (Waltman, 2016 ; Zupic and Čater, 2015 ). Our decision to exclusively use Scopus arises from two main reasons. First, the database has broader coverage than others, including the abovementioned (Falagas et al., 2008 ). Scopus includes new and emerging journals published in developing countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, our focus countries. Second, Scopus has a user-friendly interface and its search options allow researchers to flexibly explore its universe of indexed articles based on authors, institutions, titles, abstracts, keywords, and references (Donthu et al., 2021 ).

We followed the PRISMA 2020 Guideline (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) (Page et al., 2021 ) in our search for potential rice-related studies in Indonesia and the Philippines (see Fig. 1 ). We used the initial search string: “rice” AND “Indonesia*” OR “Philippine*” (asterisk or “*” was used as a wildcard search strategy) and limited the year coverage from 2001 to 2021. Our first round of searches resulted in 3846 documents (results as of 14 November 2021). We filtered these documents by including only peer-reviewed, full-text English articles on rice. We did not include any documents from the grey literature (e.g., news items, press releases, government or corporate reports), and other document types indexed in Scopus such as reviews, books, conference papers, errata, comments, editorials, and short reports.

Our initial result of 3846 documents (results as of 14 November 2021) was filtered by including only peer-reviewed, full-text English articles on rice, resulting in 2243 eligible documents.

We also excluded articles with irrelevant keywords by using the following combined queries:

This resulted in 2243 eligible documents. We downloaded these documents as raw files in BibTex format and imported them to Biblioshiny , a web interface in Bibliometrix, where they were further filtered. Our verified final dataset comprises 2243 full-text English articles cumulatively written by 6893 authors and published across 909 journals (see Table 1 ).

Structure and analytical approach

We examined the authors’ profiles based on their gender, relevance in the study, and global impact. For gender, we coded them into ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘undetermined’ because some did not put enough information that helps in gender identification. We identified their gender by counter-checking their Scopus profiles to their verified accounts in Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Publons/Web of Science, or institutional profiles. We measured the authors’ relevance and impact against their (a) productivity, (b) citations, and (c) H-indices. We acknowledge, however, that some Filipino and Indonesian scholars, whose papers may not be indexed in Scopus, could also be prolific based on different parameters, but we excluded them. We proceeded to map the collaboration networks of these authors to identify “who works with whom on what.” A collaboration network illustrates nodes (circle shape) as authors and links (connecting lines) as co-authorships (Glänzel and Schubert, 2005 ).

Institutions, countries, funders

Following Sovacool ( 2014 ), we categorized the authors’ institutions into four: (1) University and research included authors who are researchers, instructors/lecturers/professors, other academic faculty from various non-university research think tanks, institutes, and national and local research centers; (2) Government consisted country or state departments, bureaus, ministries, and other government regulatory bodies; (3) Interest groups and NGOs included intergovernmental bodies, such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Office (FAO) and international organizations like the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and Oxfam; and (4) Banking and finance encompassed players from the finance sector, including multilateral development banks such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB), World Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). After coding and categorizing, we analyzed the authors’ institutional collaboration networks.

We identified the country’s productivity and coded them by global region based on their geographical location: (a) Asia, (b) Australia, New Zealand, and South Pacific, (c) Europe, (d) North America, (e) South America, and (f) Africa. We did this to show how various countries have been researching rice in Indonesia and the Philippines since the 21st century.

We then constructed a country collaboration map as a visual macro-representation of countries working together on rice research using these data. Bibliometrix, however, measured the country’s productivity based on the corresponding authors’ affiliations. We, therefore, noted two critical points here. First, many corresponding authors may have multiple institutional affiliations. For example, one corresponding author may belong to more than two affiliations (e.g., a corresponding Filipino author may have concurrent institutional affiliations in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand). Second, the corresponding authors may not necessarily be nationals of that country. Note that the unit of analysis is based on the corresponding authors’ institutional affiliations at the time of publication and not on their country/ies of citizenship or nationality. Despite these, our findings still provide insight into the macro-level productivity of countries conducting rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines.

We analyzed the funders using Scopus’ in-house Analytics Tool and determined their relevance based on the number of articles mentioning them in the Funding source or Acknowledgment section in the paper. We categorized the funders into six: (1) government (e.g., ministries, departments, or regulatory agencies), (2) research (e.g., research councils, research centers, and national academies), (3) foundations and non-government organizations (NGOs), (4) universities, (5) private companies and corporations, and (6) intergovernmental organizations/IGOs, including multilateral development banks.

Articles and journals

In terms of interdisciplinarity, we coded the articles as (a) interdisciplinary, (b) disciplinary, or (c) unidentified by using the authors’ department or division affiliation/s as a proxy to determine their disciplinary training. We coded an article as interdisciplinary if it belonged to any of the three criteria: (1) it had an author that had training or belonged to a department/division in at least two conventional disciplines (e.g., agriculture, anthropology, sociology, biology); (2) it had an author that had a self-identified interdisciplinary department (e.g., interdisciplinary division, sustainability, agriculture economics, etc.); or (3) it had at least two authors with different disciplinary training or expertise (e.g., business and economics; crop science and political science, etc.). We coded an article as disciplinary if its author/s had only belonged to one conventional department/division affiliation (e.g., Division of Agriculture, Department of Economics, Division of Environmental Science, etc.). On the other hand, we coded an article as undetermined when the authors had only indicated the name of their institutions or did not indicate their departmental or division affiliations (e.g., only the University of the Philippines, IRRI, Universitas Gadja Mada, etc.).

We examined the articles based on their local relevance and global influence. Bibliometrix measured the articles’ relevance based on their “local citations” or citations received from the 2243 articles of our sample dataset. We did this to determine which papers are considered relevant by authors studying various areas of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines. Global influence is measured based on the articles’ citations from the global research community or other scientific works beyond our sample dataset. We also conducted a co-citation analysis of the cited references. Co-citation is the frequency by which articles cite together two or more articles relevant to the topic areas of inquiry (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017 ). Bibliometrix had identified some co-cited articles published before our timeline of interest (i.e., pre-2001) which provide scholars with a more profound understanding of rice research in the two countries.

On the other hand, Bibliometrix identified the most relevant journals based on the number of papers the journals had published and the local citations of the articles. These data guide readers and researchers on which journals to look for on rice studies in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Knowledge hotspots

Bibliometrix creates a thematic map that allows researchers to identify which study areas have been adequately explored and which areas need further investigation or re-investigation to identify knowledge hotspots and research gaps (Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017 ). Della Corte et al. ( 2019 , pp. 5–6) discussed the major themes in Bibliometrix in the following:

“Themes in the lower-right quadrant are the Basic Themes , characterized by high centrality and low density. These themes are considered essential for a research field and concerned with general topics across different research areas.

Themes in the upper-right quadrant are the Motor Themes , characterized by high centrality and density. Motor themes are considered developed and essential for the research field.

Themes in the upper-left quadrant are the highly developed and isolated themes or Niche Themes . They have well-developed internal links (high density) but unimportant external links, which could be interpreted as having limited importance for the field (low centrality).

Themes in the lower-left quadrant are known as Emerging or Declining Themes . They have low centrality and density, making them weakly developed and marginal.”

Contributions from and research agenda for the social sciences

As interdisciplinary environmental and social scientists, we also focused our review on the social studies of rice in the two countries. This section highlighted the gaps between the natural and the social sciences in rice research and advanced a research agenda for interdisciplinary and comparative social scientists.

Limitations

As in any systematic review, we acknowledge certain limitations to our work. We discuss four of these.

First, to keep a certain level of reliability, we focused only on peer-reviewed full-length research articles written in the English language and indexed in the Scopus database. Therefore, we may have excluded some relevant articles, including those written in Filipino, Indonesian, and other local or indigenous languages and published in local or international journals but are not indexed in Scopus. Our review also excluded conference papers, commentaries, book reviews, book chapters, conference reviews, data papers, errata, letters, notes, and non-academic publications like policy briefings, reports, and white papers.

Second, in our quantitative content analysis, we acknowledge the highly cis-heteronormative approach we used in coding the author’s gender as “man” or “woman.” We identified these genders from the names and pictures of the authors in their verified Scopus, Publons/ Web of Science, and institutional profiles. It is not our deliberate intention to neglect the varying genders of researchers and scientists beyond the traditional binary of man or woman.

Third, we recognize that our analysis cannot directly identify how much each funder provided as the unit of analysis in bibliometrix may depend on how prolific researchers were in publishing articles despite smaller funds. For instance, one research project supported by Funder A with US$1 million may have published only one article based on their project design or the funder's requirement. Since the authors published only one paper from this project, the data could show that Funder A only funded one research. Another research project, supported by Funder B, with only US$300,000 in funding, may have published more than five papers; therefore, more articles counted as funded by Funder B. This issue is not within the scope of our review.

Lastly, it should be noted that the future research works we discussed were highly influenced by our research interests and the general overview of the literature, and thus neither intend to cover nor aim to discuss the entire research topics that other scholars could study.

Despite these limitations, we strongly argue that our review provided relevant insights and proposed potentially novel topic areas and research questions for other scholars to explore, especially social scientists, in deepening and widening rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines. To end, we hope that researchers heed our call to conduct more interdisciplinary and comparative rice-related studies in these two emerging Southeast Asian countries.

Results and discussions

Our dataset comprises 2243 peer-reviewed journal articles cumulatively written by 6893 authors who cited around 80,000 cumulative references. The average annual publications from 2001 to 2013 were only 57 papers but elevated to hundreds beginning in 2014 (Fig. 2 ).

The average number of annual publications on rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines from 2001 to 2013 was only 57 papers but elevated to hundreds beginning in 2014.

Of the 159 authors, one had a duplicate profile; thus, we identified 158 authors publishing on rice studies; the majority (66%) are men. The top 50 most prolific scholars produced a little over 25% (567 articles) of the total articles. Australian ecologist Finbarr Horgan topped this list ( n  = 21), followed by Bas Bouman and Grant Singleton—each with 20 articles. The top 10 authors with the highest number of publications have affiliations with the IRRI, the University of the Philippines, the University of Gadjah Mada, and the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice). For the full list of prolific scholars with at least 10 articles published, see Supplementary Table 1 .

In terms of the authors with the most local citations, although Finbarr Horgan has the most documents, Johan Iskandar ( n  = 36 citations) from the Universitas Padjadjaran, who studies rice genetic diversity, is the most cited. Local citations refer to the citations received by authors from our sample dataset of 2243 articles. Muhidin Muhidin from the Universitas Halu Oleo and Ruhyat Partasasmita from the Universitas Padjadjaran, followed him with 30 and 28 local citations, respectively. Common to these three authors are their Biology background/expertise and interest in rice genetic diversity. To check the top 20 most locally cited scholars, refer to Supplementary Table 2 .

The H-index is the author-level measure of publications’ productivity and citation impacts (Hirsch, 2005 ). Bas Bouman (H-index = 18) leads the top 10 scholars among rice-related researchers in Indonesia and the Philippines. Yoshimichi Fukuta (H index = 13) and Shaobing Peng (H index = 13) followed him. These three authors are affiliated with or have collaborated with the IRRI. To check the top 10 scholars with the highest H-indices, refer to Supplementary Table 3 .

Figure 3 reveals the top 80 authors who collaborate across eight major clusters of rice research. The Red cluster shows Finbarr Horgan as the most prominent author with at least four significant collaborators in pest management, specifically on rice stemborers (Horgan et al., 2021 ), anthropods’ biodiversity in tropical rice ecosystems (Horgan et al., 2019 ), and virulence adaptations of rice leafhoppers (Horgan et al., 2018 ). In the Purple Cluster, Yoshimichi Fukuta has multiple publications with at least six collaborators in the study of rice blast (Ebitani et al., 2011 ; Kadeawi et al., 2021 ; Mizobuchi et al., 2014 ). In the Brown cluster, Bernard Canapi from the IRRI has collaborated with at least five scholars in the study of rice insect pest management (Cabasan et al., 2019 ; Halwart et al., 2014 ; Litsinger et al., 2011 ), farmers’ preference for rice traits (Laborte et al., 2015 ), and the drivers and consequences of genetic erosion in traditional rice agroecosystems in the Philippines (Zapico et al., 2020 ). The Gray cluster shows that Siti Herlinda has collaborated with at least four scholars to study anthropods in freshwater swamp rice fields (Hanif et al., 2020 ; Herlinda et al., 2020 ) and the benefits of biochar on rice growth and yield (Lakitan et al., 2018 ).

The authors’ collaboration networks show eight major clusters of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Institutions

Author affiliations.

In terms of institutional types, Fig. 4 shows that most rice researchers in Indonesia and the Philippines have affiliations with “University and research.” Figure 5 shows the top 20 institutions in terms of research productivity led by the IRRI, the University of the Philippines System, the PhilRice, the Institute Pertanian Bogor/IPB University, and the University of Gadja Mada. These 20 institutions produced 66% of the articles in our dataset.

The majority of rice researchers in Indonesia and the Philippines have affiliations with “University and research”.

The top 5 most productive institutions in terms of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines are the IRRI, the University of the Philippines System, the PhilRice, the Institute Pertanian Bogor/IPB University, and the University of Gadja Mada.

Scholars affiliated with the IRRI have written the most papers (at least 19% or 358 articles) in our dataset. The range of topics covers both regional and country studies. Some regional examples include the drivers of consumer demand for packaged rice and rice fragrance in South and Southeast Asia (Bairagi et al., 2020 ; Bairagi, Gustafson et al., 2021 ). Country studies, for example, include an investigation of rice farming in Central Java, Indonesia (Connor et al., 2021 ), the cultural significance of heirloom rice in Ifugao in the Philippines (Bairagi, Custodio et al., 2021 ), and the distributional impacts of the 2019 Philippine rice tariffication policy (Balié and Valera, 2020 ).

The University of the Philippines System, with rice scholars affiliated with their campuses in Los Baños, Diliman, Mindanao, and Manila, produced the next largest number of papers (more than 200 or 10%) on topics about rice pests and parasites (Horgan et al., 2019 , 2021 ; Vu et al., 2018 ), weed control (Awan et al., 2014 , 2015 ; Fabro and Varca, 2012 ), and climate change impacts on rice farming (Alejo and Ella, 2019 ; Ducusin et al., 2019 ; Gata et al., 2020 ). Social studies of rice conducted by the University of the Philippines researchers include indigenous knowledge on climate risk management (Ruzol et al., 2020 , 2021 ), management options in extreme weather events (Lopez and Mendoza, 2004 ), agroecosystem change (Aguilar et al., 2021 ; Neyra-Cabatac et al., 2012 ), and the development and change over time of rice production landscapes (Santiago and Buot, 2018 ; Tekken et al., 2017 ).

PhilRice, a government-owned corporation under the Department of Agriculture (Official Gazette of the Philippines, 2021 ), is the third most prolific rice research-producing institution (122 papers) on topics ranging from nematodes or rice worms (Gergon et al., 2001 , 2002 ) and arthropods (invertebrates found in rice paddies) (Dominik et al., 2018 ), hybrid rice (Perez et al., 2008 ; Xu et al., 2002 ), alternate wetting-and-drying technology (Lampayan et al., 2015 ; Palis et al., 2017 ), and community development strategies on rice productions (Romanillos et al., 2016 ).

The IPB University, a public agrarian university in Bogor, Indonesia, investigates rice productivity and sustainability (Arif et al., 2012 ; Mucharam et al., 2020 ; Setiawan et al., 2013 ), irrigation (Nugroho et al., 2018 ; Panuju et al., 2013 ), extreme weather events such as drought (Dulbari et al., 2021 ), floods (Wakabayashi et al., 2021 ), and emerging social issues such as food security (Putra et al., 2020 ), land-use change (Chrisendo et al., 2020 ; Munajati et al., 2021 ), and sustainability (Mizuno et al., 2013 ). This university has 23 research centers, including those which focus on environmental research; agricultural and village development; engineering applications in tropical agriculture; Southeast Asian food and agriculture; and agrarian studies.

Universitas Gadja Maja in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, hosts 21 research centers, including its Agrotechnology Innovation Centre. It carries out research incubation and development activities, product commercialization, and integration of agriculture, animal husbandry, energy, and natural resources into a sustainable Science Techno Park. Some of their published studies focused on drought-tolerant rice cultivars (Salsinha et al., 2020 , 2021 ; Trijatmiko et al., 2014 ), farmers’ technical efficiency (Mulyani et al., 2020 ; Widyantari et al., 2018 , 2019 ), systems of rice intensification (Arif et al., 2015 ; Syahrawati et al., 2018 ), and climate change adaptation (Ansari et al., 2021 ).

In terms of institutional collaboration, the IRRI tops the list with at least eleven collaborators (Fig. 6 ), including the Japan International Center for Agricultural Sciences, the PhilRice, the University of the Philippines System, and the Indonesian Center for Rice Research.

The IRRI, as an international organization focused on many aspects of rice, is not surprising to have the greatest number of institutional collaborators ( n  = 11 institutions).

Rice studies’ authors are from at least 79 countries; the majority of them are working in Asia (79%), followed by Europe (13%) and North America (9%). At least 90% of rice scholars are in Indonesia, and more than 51% have affiliations in the Philippines, followed by Japan, the USA, and China. For the list of the top 20 most productive countries researching rice in Indonesia and the Philippines, see Supplementary Table 4 . Figure 7 shows a macro-level picture of how countries have collaborated on rice-related projects in Indonesia and the Philippines since 2001, suggesting that rice research in both countries has benefited from international partnerships.

A macro-level picture of how countries have collaborated on rice-related projects in Indonesia and the Philippines since 2001. It suggests that rice research in both countries has benefited from international partnerships.

Only around 47% (1050 studies) of our dataset acknowledged their funding sources, where most received financial support either from governments (45%), research (27%), or university funders (16%) (Fig. 8 ). To see the top 15 funders that supported at least 10 rice-related research projects in Indonesia and the Philippines from 2001 to 2021, refer to Supplementary Table 5 . Of over 150 rice research funders, Indonesia’s Ministry of Education, Culture, and Research (formerly the Ministry of Research and Technology) funded ~6% (62 out of 1050 studies). The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology came in as the second and third largest funders, respectively.

The majority of rice research projects in Indonesia and the Philippines were funded by governments (45%), research (27%), and university institutions (16%).

Half of all articles in the dataset were borne out of interdisciplinary collaboration. More than a quarter of the articles, however, were unidentified, showing an apparent undercount of the total number of disciplinary collaborations. Most of these collaborative pieces of work (~61%) belong to the natural science subject areas of agricultural and biological sciences; biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology; and environmental science (see Table 2 ). Note that the cumulative number of articles in Table 2 is more than the total number of the sample dataset since an article may belong to multiple subject areas as indicated by its authors in Scopus. Less than 9% (354) of all papers were written by social scientists, highlighting their marginal contribution to rice research. The social studies of rice can increase our understanding of the many facets of rice production, including their socio-political, economic, and cultural aspects.

Our review shows that there are 10 major networks of rice research co-citations (Fig. 9 ). The papers by Bouman et al. ( 2005 ), Bouman et al. ( 2007 ), Bouman and Tuong ( 2001 ), and Tuong and Bouman ( 2003 ) were co-cited by scholars studying the relationship between water scarcity management vis-à-vis rice growth and yield (the purple cluster in Fig. 9 ). Papers by Yoshida et al. ( 2009 ), De Datta ( 1981 ), and Peng et al. ( 1999 ) were co-cited by scholars researching the genetic diversity, yield, and principles and practices of rice production in Indonesia (the red cluster in Fig. 9 ). Papers by Ou ( 1985 ), Mackill and Bonman ( 1992 ), Sambrook et al. ( 1989 ), Kauffman et al. ( 1973 ), Iyer and McCouch ( 2004 ), and Mew ( 1987 ) were considered essential references in studying rice diseases (blue cluster in Fig. 9 ). The top-cited article on rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines, based on their overall global citations, is a study on water-efficient and water-saving irrigation (Belder et al., 2004 ). This study detailed alternative options for typical water management in lowland rice cultivation, where fields are continuously submerged, hence requiring a continuous large amount of water supply (Belder et al., 2004 ). Global citations refer to the citations received by the articles within and beyond our sample dataset of 2243 articles. To see the top 10 most globally cited articles on rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines, refer to Supplementary Table 6 .

There are 10 major networks of rice research co-citations in Indonesia and the Philippines.

The journal Biodiversitas: Journal of Biological Diversity published the most number of papers on rice research in the two countries. Biodiversitas publishes papers “dealing with all biodiversity aspects of plants, animals, and microbes at the level of gene, species, ecosystem, and ethnobiology” (Biodiversitas, 2021 ). Following its indexing in Scopus in 2014, Biodiversitas has increasingly published rice studies, most of which were authored by Indonesian researchers. To see the top 10 most relevant journals for rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines based on the number of documents published since 2001, refer to Supplementary Table 7 .

Based on their local citations, the journals Field Crops Research , Theoretical & Applied Genetics , and Science are the most relevant. Field Crops Research focuses on crop ecology, crop physiology, and agronomy of field crops for food, fiber, feed, medicine, and biofuel. Theoretical and Applied Genetics publishes original research and review articles in all critical areas of modern plant genetics, plant genomics, and plant biotechnology. Science is the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and one of the world’s top academic journals. To see the top 30 most relevant journals for rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines based on the number of local citations, refer to Supplementary Table 8 .

The most used keywords found in 2243 rice research papers published between 2001 and 2021 in Indonesia and the Philippines are food security, climate change, drought, agriculture, irrigation, genetic diversity, sustainability, technical efficiency, and production (Fig. 10 ). We found 11 clusters across four significant themes of rice research in these countries (Fig. 11 ).

The most used keywords found in 2243 rice research papers published between 2001 and 2021 in Indonesia and the Philippines are food security, climate change, drought, agriculture, irrigation, genetic diversity, sustainability, technical efficiency, and production.

There are four major themes composed of 11 clusters of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines since 2001.

Basic themes

We identified four major clusters under ‘basic themes’ (refer to Fig. 11 ):

The Red Cluster on studies in the Philippines related to rice yield and productivity, drought, nitrogen, the Green Revolution, and the use and potential of biomass;

The Blue Cluster on studies in Indonesia related to food security, climate change, agriculture, upland rice, irrigation, technical efficiency, and sustainability vis-à-vis rice production;

The Green Cluster on rice genetic diversity, bacterial blight diseases, resistant rice genes, aerobic rice, and brown planthoppers; and

The Gray Cluster on the nutritional aspects of rice, including studies on biofortified rice cultivars.

Agriculture suffers from climate change impacts and weather extremes. Rice researchers in Indonesia and the Philippines are identifying drought-tolerant rice cultivars that can produce high yields in abiotic stress-prone environments (Afa et al., 2018 ; Niones et al., 2021 ). These hybrid cultivars are vital for increasing rice productivity, meeting production demand, and feeding the growing Filipino and Indonesian populations (Kumar et al., 2021 ; Lapuz et al., 2019 ). Researchers have also looked at alternative nutrient and water management strategies that farmers can use, especially those in rainfed lowland areas during drought (Banayo, Bueno et al., 2018 ; Banayo, Haefele et al., 2018 ). There were also studies on the socio-cultural dynamics under which farmers adapt to droughts, such as how past experiences of hazards influence farmers’ perceptions of and actions toward drought (Manalo et al., 2020 ).

Motor themes

We identified three significant clusters of ‘motor themes’ (refer to Fig. 11 ):

The Pink Cluster on yield loss and integrated pest management of rice fields;

The Blue-Green Cluster on biodiversity, ecosystem services, remote sensing, and water productivity; and

The Orange Cluster on the antioxidant properties of rice bran and black rice.

In both countries, pests, including weeds (Awan et al., 2014 , 2015 ), insects (Horgan et al., 2018 , 2021 ), and rodents (Singleton, 2011 ; Singleton et al., 2005 , 2010 ), have significant impacts on yield loss in rice production and human health. To address these, many farmers have embraced chemical-heavy pest management practices to prevent yield loss and increase economic benefits. Pesticides began their use in Indonesia and the Philippines and rapidly expanded from the 1970s to the 1980s (Resosudarmo, 2012 ; Templeton and Jamora, 2010 ). However, indiscriminate use of pesticides caused an ecological imbalance that exacerbated pest problems (Templeton and Jamora, 2010 ) and contributed to farmers’ acute and chronic health risks (Antle and Pingali, 1994 ; Pingali and Roger, 1995 ).

Integrated pest management was introduced, applied, and studied in both countries to address these issues. This approach combines multiple compatible pest control strategies to protect crops, reduce pesticide use, and decrease farming costs (Gott and Coyle, 2019 ). For example, Indonesia’s 1989 National Integrated Pest Management Program trained hundreds of thousands of farmers and agricultural officials about its principles, techniques, and strategies (Resosudarmo, 2012 ). In the Philippines, the government of then-President Fidel V. Ramos (1992–1996) prohibited using hazardous pesticides and instituted a “multi-pronged approach to the judicious use of pesticides” (Templeton and Jamora, 2010 , p. 1). President Ramos’ suite of policies included deploying Integrated Pest Management “as a national program to encourage a more ecologically sound approach to pest control” (Templeton and Jamora, 2010 , p. 1). This pesticide policy package benefited the Philippine government in terms of private health costs avoided (Templeton and Jamora, 2010 ).

To address weed problems, farmers traditionally use manual weeding, a labor-intensive practice. However, as labor costs for manual weeding increased, herbicide use became economically attractive to farmers (Beltran et al., 2012 ). Herbicide experiments were made to address common rice weeds including barnyard grass ( Echinochloa crus-galli ) (Juliano et al., 2010 ), crowfoot grass ( Dactyloctenium aegyptium ) (Chauhan, 2011 ), three-lobe morning glory ( Ipomoea triloba ) (Chauhan and Abugho, 2012 ), and jungle rice ( Echinochloa colona ) (Chauhan and Johnson, 2009 ). Knowledge gained from these experiments contributed to the development of integrated weed management strategies.

Yet, many factors come into play when farmers decide to use herbicides. Beltran et al. ( 2013 ) reported that farmers’ age, household size, and irrigation use are significant determinants of adopting herbicides as an alternative to manual weeding. Beltran et al. ( 2013 ) further showed that economic variables, like the price of the herbicide, household income, and access to credit, determined farmers’ level of herbicide use (Beltran et al., 2013 ). Their study highlights the complex decision-making process and competing factors affecting weed management in the Philippines.

Apart from weeds, insects, like brown planthoppers ( Nilaparvata lugens ) and green leafhoppers ( Cicadella viridis ) and their accompanying diseases, affect rice production. In Java, Indonesia, Triwidodo ( 2020 ) reported a significant influence between the insecticide use scheme and the brown planthopper ( Nilaparvata lugens ) attack rates in rice fields. Brown planthopper attacks increased depending on the frequency of pesticide application, their varieties, and volume (Triwidodo, 2020 ). In the Philippines, Kim and colleagues ( 2019 ) developed a rice tungro epidemiological model for a seasonal disaster risk management approach to insect infestation.

Some social studies of integrated pest management included those that looked at the cultural practices that mitigate insect pest losses (Litsinger et al., 2011 ) and farmers’ knowledge, attitudes, and methods to manage rodent populations (Stuart et al., 2011 ). Other social scientists evaluated the value of amphibians as pest controls, bio-monitors for pest-related health outcomes, and local food and income sources (Propper et al., 2020 ).

Niche themes

We identified two ‘niche themes’ consisting of studies related to (a) temperature change and (b) organic rice production (refer to Fig. 11 ). Temperature change significantly affects rice farming. In the Philippines, Stuecker et al. ( 2018 ) found that El Niño-induced soil moisture variations negatively affected rice production from 1987–2016. According to one experiment, high night temperature stress also affect rice yield and metabolic profiles (Schaarschmidt et al., 2020 ). In Indonesia, a study suggests that introducing additional elements, such as Azolla, fish, and ducks, into the rice farming system may enhance rice farmers’ capacity to adapt to climate change (Khumairoh et al., 2018 ). Another study produced a rainfall model for Malang Regency using Spatial Vector Autoregression. This model is essential as rainfall pattern largely determines the cropping pattern of rice and other crops in Indonesia (Sumarminingsih, 2021 ).

Studies on organic rice farming in the Philippines include resource-poor farmers’ transition from technological to ecological rice farming (Carpenter, 2003 ) and the benefits of organic agriculture in rice agroecosystems (Mendoza, 2004 ). Other studies on organic rice focused on its impacts on agricultural development (Broad and Cavanagh, 2012 ) and climate resilience (Heckelman et al., 2018 ). In Indonesia, Martawijaya and Montgomery ( 2004 ) found that the local demand for organic rice produced in East Java was insufficient to generate revenue enough to cover its production costs. In West Java, Komatsuzaki and Syuaib ( 2010 ) found that organic rice farming fields have higher soil carbon storage capacity than fields where rice is grown conventionally. In Bali, farmers found it challenging to adopt organic rice farming vis-à-vis the complex and often contradictory and contested administration of the Subaks (MacRae and Arthawiguna, 2011 ) and the challenges they have to confront in marketing their produce (Macrae, 2011 ).

Emerging or declining themes

We identified two clusters of ‘emerging/declining themes’ or areas of rice research that are weakly developed and marginal (refer to Fig. 11 ). The Purple Cluster (emerging) studies rice straw, rice husk, methane, and rice cultivation, while the Light Blue Cluster (declining) pertains to local rice research.

In this section, we present and discuss the contributions of the social sciences, highlight key gaps, and provide a research agenda across six interdisciplinary areas for future studies. In Table 3 , we summarized the various topic areas that other scholars could focus on in their future studies of rice in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Economic, political, and policy studies

Political scientist Ernest A. Engelbert ( 1953 ) was one of the earliest scholars to summarize the importance of studying agricultural economics, politics, and policies. Engelbert ( 1953 ) identified three primary reasons scholars and laypeople alike need to understand the nature of political processes in agriculture. First, the rapid change and highly contested political environment where agriculture operates often places agriculture last on national policy agenda. Second, the formulation of agricultural policies intersects with contemporary national and economic contexts by which these policies revolve. Third, understanding the political processes around agriculture can help avoid political pressures and machinations aimed at undermining agricultural development.

Politics play a crucial role in better understanding rice- and agriculture-related policies, their evolution, dynamics, challenges, developments, and futures. Grant ( 2012 , p. 271) aptly asks, “Who benefits [from government policies, regulations, and programs]?” . Knowing, understanding, and answering this question is crucial since policymaking is a highly contested process influenced and negotiated not only by farmers and decision-makers but also by other interest groups, such as people’s organizations and non-government organizations. On the other hand, understanding macro- and micro-economic government arrangements come hand-in-hand in analyzing how policies impact farmers and consumers. Using tariffs as an example, Laiprakobsup ( 2014 , p. 381) noted the effects of government interventions in the agrarian market:

“… when the government implements consumer subsidy programs by requiring the farmers to sell their commodities at a cheaper price, it transfers the farmers’ incomes that they were supposed to earn to the consumers. Moreover, the government transfers tax burdens to the farmers via export taxes in that the agricultural industry is likely to purchase the farmers’ commodities as cheaply as possible in order to make up for its cost.”

The two countries have compelling economic, political, and policy-oriented rice studies. Some examples of this type of research in the Philippines are the following. Intal and Garcia ( 2005 ) argued that the price of rice had been a significant determinant in election results since the 1950s. Fang ( 2016 ) analyzed how the Philippines’ colonial history bolstered an oligarchy system, where landed elite politicians and patronage politics perpetuated corruption to the detriment of rice farmers. Balié and Valera ( 2020 ) examined rice trade policy reforms’ domestic and international impacts. San Juan ( 2021 ) contends that the 2019 Rice Tariffication Law of the Philippines only encouraged the country to rely on imports and failed to make the local rice industry more competitive.

In Indonesia, some political studies on rice production are the following. Putra et al. ( 2020 ) analyzed how urbanization affected food consumption, food composition, and farming performance. Noviar et al. ( 2020 ) provided evidence that households in the rice sub-sector have achieved an insufficient level of commercialization in their rice production. Rustiadi et al. ( 2021 ) investigated the impacts of land incursions over traditionally rice farming regions due to Jakarta’s continuous expansion. Satriawan and Shrestha ( 2018 ) evaluated how Indonesian households participated in the Raskin program, a nationwide rice price subsidy scheme for the poor. Misdawita et al. ( 2019 ) formulated a social accounting matrix and used a microsimulation approach to assess the impacts of food prices on the Indonesian economy.

Future work

Social science researchers could further explore and compare the local, regional, and national similarities and differences of the abovementioned issues or conduct novel research related to land-use change, land management, urbanization, food and agricultural policies, trade policies, irrigation governance, and price dynamics. Comparative social studies of rice could also lead to meaningful results. As social policy scholar Linda Hantrais noted:

“Comparisons can lead to fresh, exciting insights and a deeper understanding of issues that are of central concern in different countries. They can lead to the identification of gaps in knowledge and may point to possible directions that could be followed and about which the researcher may not previously have been aware. They may also help to sharpen the focus of analysis of the subject under study by suggesting new perspectives.” (Hantrais, 1995 , p. n/a).

Sociological, anthropological, and cultural studies

Biologists dominated agricultural research until the mid-1960s (Doorman, 1991 ). Agriculture, in other words, was no social scientist’s business. However, this situation gradually changed when governments and scholars realized the long-term impacts of the Green Revolution from the 1950s to the 1980s, which underscores that the development, transfer, and adoption of new agrotechnology, especially in developing countries, is driven not only by techno-biological factors but also by the socio-economic, political, and cultural realities under which the farmers operate. Since then, sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural scholars have become indispensable in answering the “how”, “what”, and “why” agrarian communities follow, adopt, utilize, or, in some cases, prefer local/traditional production technologies over the technological and scientific innovations developed by engineers, biologists, geneticists, and agriculturists. Nyle C. Brady, a soil scientist and the former Director-General of the IRRI pointed out:

“… we increasingly recognize that factors relating directly to the farmer, his family, and his community must be considered if the full effects of agricultural research are to be realized. This recognition has come partly from the participation of anthropologists and other social scientists in interdisciplinary teams … during the past few years.” (IRRI, 1982 ).

Since the late 19th century, many rice studies have tried to answer the roles of social scientists in agricultural research. Social sciences have contributed to agricultural research in many ways, especially regarding technology adoption by farmers (DeWalt, 1985 ; Doorman, 1990 ). Doorman ( 1991 , p. 4) synthesized these studies and offered seven roles for sociologists and anthropologists in agricultural research as follows:

“Accommodator of new technology, ex-post and ex-ante evaluator of the impact of new technology, an indicator of the needs for new technology, translator of farmer’s perceptions, broker-sensitizer, adviser in on-farm research, and trainer of team members from other disciplines.”

Social studies of rice are especially critical in Indonesia and the Philippines—home to hundreds of Indigenous cultural communities and Indigenous peoples (Asian Development Bank, 2002 ; UNDP Philippines, 2010 ). Regardless of the highly contested debates surrounding “indigeneity” or “being indigenous,” especially in Indonesia (Hadiprayitno, 2017 ), we argue that Indigenous cultural communities and Indigenous peoples have similarities (i.e., they are often farming or agrarian societies) but also recognize their differences and diversity in terms of their farming practices, beliefs, traditions, and rituals. These socio-cultural factors and human and non-human interactions influence rice production; thus, these differences and diversity bring front-and-center the importance of needs-based, community-driven, and context-sensitive interventions or projects for rice farming communities. These are research areas best explored by sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural scholars.

Today, agriculture’s sociological, anthropological, and cultural research have gone beyond the classic technology adoption arena. In Indonesia, studies have explored farmers’ technical efficiency in rice production (e.g., Muhardi and Effendy, 2021 ), the similarities and differences of labor regimes among them (e.g., White and Wijaya, 2021 ), the role of social capital (e.g., Salman et al., 2021 ), and the reciprocal human–environmental interactions in the rice ecological system (e.g., Sanjatmiko, 2021 ). Disyacitta Nariswari and Lauder ( 2021 ) conducted a dialectological study to examine the various Sundanese, Javanese, and Betawi Malay words used in rice production. Rochman et al. ( 2021 ) looked into the ngahuma (planting rice in the fields) as one of the inviolable customary laws of the Baduy Indigenous cultural community in Banten, Indonesia.

In the Philippines, Balogbog and Gomez ( 2020 ) identified upland rice farmers’ productivity and technical efficiency in Sarangani. Aguilar et al. ( 2021 ) examined the drivers of change, resilience, and potential trajectories of traditional rice-based agroecosystems in Kiangan, Ifugao. Pasiona et al. ( 2021 ) found that using the “modified listening group method” enables farmers’ peer-to-peer learning of technical concepts. Sociologist Shunnan Chiang ( 2020 ) examined the driving forces behind the transformation of the status of brown rice in the country.

Social scientists could further look into the social, cultural, technological, and human–ecological interactions in the temporal and spatial studies of different rice farming regions in Indonesia and the Philippines. Other topics could include the cultural practices and the techno-social relationships of rice farmers (e.g., Shepherd and McWilliam, 2011 ) and other players in the rice value chain, local and indigenous knowledge and practices on agrobiodiversity conservation, historical and invasive pests and diseases, agricultural health and safety, farmer education, and aging agricultural infrastructures. Lastly, future researchers can explore the impacts of adopting rice farming technologies in the different stages or processes of the rice value chain. They can look into its short- and longer-term effects on farmers’ livelihoods and conduct comparative analyses on how it improves, or not, their livelihoods, and whether farmers regard them better compared to the traditional and indigenous practices and beliefs that their communities apply and observe in rice farming.

Social and environmental psychology

Our review yielded no article published on the social and environmental psychology aspects of rice farming in Indonesia and the Philippines, suggesting a new research frontier. The increasing demand for and competition over agricultural and natural resources due to climate change and population expansion (Foley et al., 2011 ) opens up new and emerging sociopsychological dilemmas for society to understand, answer, and, hopefully, solve. Social and environmental psychologists can help shed light on these questions, such as those related to understanding farmers’ pro-environmental agricultural practices (Price and Leviston, 2014 ), sustainable sharing and management of agricultural and natural resources (Anderies et al., 2013 ; Biel and Gärling, 1995 ), and understanding the psychosocial consequences of resource scarcity (Griskevicius et al., 2013 ). Broadly, social psychology examines human feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and how they are influenced by the actual, imagined, and implied presence, such as the effects of internalized social norms (Allport, 1985 ). Social psychologists look at the many facets of personality and social interactions and explore the impacts of interpersonal and group relationships on human behavior (American Psychological Association, 2014b ). On the other hand, environmental psychology examines psychological processes in human encounters with their natural and built environments (Stern, 2000 ). Environmental psychologists are interested in studying and understanding people’s responses to natural and technological hazards, conservation, and perceptions of the environment (American Psychological Association, 2014a ).

Using the Asian Journal of Social Psychology and the Journal of Environmental Psychology as benchmarks, we recommend that scholars explore the following uncharted or least studied areas of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines: sociopsychological processes such as attitude and behavior, social cognition, self and identity, individual differences, emotions, human–environmental health and well-being, social influence, communication, interpersonal behavior, intergroup relations, group processes, and cultural processes. Researchers could also investigate the psycho-behavioral areas of nature–people interactions, theories of place, place attachment, and place identity, especially in rice farming. Other topics may include farmers’ perceptions, behaviors, and management of environmental risks and hazards; theories of pro-environmental behaviors; psychology of sustainable agriculture; and the psychological aspects of resource/land management and land-use change.

Climate change, weather extremes, and disaster risk reduction

Indonesia’s and Philippines’ equatorial and archipelagic location in the Pacific Ring of Fire (Bankoff, 2016 ; Parwanto and Oyama, 2014 ), coupled with their political, social, and economic complexities (Bankoff, 2003 , 2007 ; UNDRR and CRED, 2020 ), expose and render these countries highly vulnerable to hazards, such as typhoons, strong winds, tsunamis, storm surges, floods, droughts, and earthquakes. The accelerating global climate change increases the frequency and intensity of some of these hazards, such as prolonged droughts, torrential rainfalls causing floods, and super typhoons (IPCC, 2014 ). For example, torrential flooding, induced by heavy rains caused by low pressures and southwest monsoons, has been damaging lives and livelihoods, including rice production (Statista, 2021 ). The 2020 droughts caused over 12 trillion pesos (~US$239.40 billion) of economic losses in the Philippines (Statista, 2021 ) and affected millions of Indonesians (UNDRR, 2020 ). Prolonged drought in Indonesia has also exacerbated fire hazards, which caused transboundary haze pollution in neighboring countries, like Singapore and the Philippines, inflecting environmental health damages (Aiken, 2004 ; Sheldon and Sankaran, 2017 ; Tan-Soo and Pattanayak, 2019 ). Increasing sea-level rise due to anthropogenic climate change puts cities like Jakarta and Manila at risk of sinking in the next 30–50 years (Kulp and Strauss, 2019 ). The high vulnerability, frequent exposure, and low capacities of marginalized and poor Indonesians and Filipinos turn these hazards into disasters (Gaillard, 2010 ; Kelman, 2020 ; Kelman et al., 2015 ), negatively affecting rice agriculture.

Given these contexts, climate change, weather extremes, and disaster risks, vis-à-vis its impacts on the rice sector, are issues of profound interest to scholars and the Indonesian and Philippine governments. In the Philippines, climate adaptation studies include re-engineering rice drying systems for climate change (Orge et al., 2020 ) and evaluating climate-smart farming practices and the effectiveness of Climate-Resiliency Field Schools in Mindanao (Chandra et al., 2017 ). In Indonesia, where some rice farming communities are vulnerable to sea-level rise, scholars are experimenting to identify rice cultivars with high yields under different salinity levels (Sembiring et al., 2020 ). Hohl et al. ( 2021 ) used a regional climate model to develop index-based drought insurance products to help the Central Java government make drought-related insurance payments to rice farmers. Aprizal et al. ( 2021 ) utilized land-use conditions and rain variability data to develop a flood inundation area model for the Way Sekampung sub-watershed in Lampung, Sumatra. Others also looked at the science behind liquefaction hazards caused by irrigation systems for wet rice cultivation in mountainous farming communities like the 2018 earthquake-triggered landslides in Palu Valley, Sulawesi (Bradley et al., 2019 ).

Examples of climate mitigation-related studies in the Philippines include investigating the social innovation strategies in engaging rice farmers in bioenergy development (Minas et al., 2020 ) and evaluating the environmental performance and energy efficiency of rice straw-generated electricity sources (Reaño et al., 2021 ). Doliente and Samsatli ( 2021 ) argue that it is possible to combine energy and food production to increase farm productivity and reduce GHG emissions with minimal land expansion. Other studies have looked into the potential of alternate wetting and drying irrigation practices to mitigate emissions from rice fields (Sander et al., 2020 ).

Future work could explore the following topic areas: demand-driven research and capacity building on climate information and environmental monitoring; nature-based solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation; water–energy–food nexus in rice farming; the nexus of climate change and conflict in rice farming communities; the potentials and pitfalls of social capital in farmer’s everyday adaptation; just energy transitions in rice farming; vulnerabilities from and traditional/local/indigenous ways of adapting to climate change, including the various learning strategies communities use for its preservation; and examples, potentials, and barriers in adopting climate-smart agriculture technologies and practices.

Demographic transitions and aging farmers

Farmers are in various stages and speeds of aging globally (Rigg et al., 2020 ). Evidence of aging farmers in the Global North has been reported in Australia (O’Callaghan and Warburton, 2017 ; Rogers et al., 2013 ), the Czech Republic (Zagata et al., 2015 ), England (Hamilton et al., 2015 ), Japan (Poungchompu et al., 2012 ; Usman et al., 2021 ), and the United States of America (Mitchell et al., 2008 ; Reed, 2008 ; Yudelman and Kealy, 2000 ). Similarly, in the Global South, HelpAge International ( 2014 , p. 21) reported that “there has been a universal trend of an increase in the proportion of older people… attached to agricultural holdings… across [Low and Middle-income Countries in] Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.” Moreover, farming populations are aging rapidly in East and Southeast Asia (Rigg et al., 2020 ) and southern Africa (HelpAge, 2014 ). Despite this, the literature on aging farmers in Southeast Asian countries remains scant, except for case studies conducted in some villages and provinces in Thailand (Poungchompu et al., 2012 ; Rigg et al., 2018 , 2020 ) and the Philippines (Moya et al., 2015 ; Palis, 2020 ).

Rice farmers’ quiet but critical demographic transformation in Indonesia and the Philippines has not received much attention from scientists, policymakers, and development practitioners. The impacts of aging farmers on the micro-, meso-, and macro-level agricultural processes and outcomes are important issues that require urgent attention. Studies done in other countries could guide future work to explore these questions in Indonesia and the Philippines. These include aging’s potential negative implications in terms of agricultural efficiency and productivity (e.g., Tram and McPherson ( 2016 ) in Vietnam, and Szabo et al. ( 2021 ) in Thailand), food security (e.g., Bhandari and Mishra ( 2018 ) in Asia), farming continuity and sustainability (e.g., O’Callaghan and Warburton ( 2017 ) in Australia, Palis ( 2020 ) in the Philippines, and Rigg et al. ( 2018 , 2020 ) in Thailand), aging and feminization of farm labor (e.g., Liu et al. ( 2019 ) in China), cleaner production behaviors (e.g., Liu et al. ( 2021 ) in Northern China), youth barriers to farm entry (e.g., Zagata and Sutherland ( 2015 ) in Europe), and health and well-being of aging farmers (Jacka, 2018 ; Rogers et al., 2013 ; Ye et al., 2017 ).

Other critical new topics include the (dis)engagement and re-engagement of young people in rice farming; gender dynamics—including structures and systems of inclusion and/or exclusion—in rice production; the impacts of migration and return migration to farming households; community-based and policy-oriented case studies that provide examples of successfully engaging and retaining youth workers in farming; and social protection measures for aging farmers, to name a few.

Contemporary and emerging challenges

One of the biggest and most visible contemporary global challenges is the Covid-19 pandemic. Most pronounced is the pandemic’s impacts on the healthcare system and the economic toll it caused on the lives and livelihoods of people, including rice farmers. Only 0.18% (4 articles) of our dataset have investigated the impacts of Covid-19 on rice systems in Indonesia and the Philippines. Ling et al. ( 2021 ) assessed the effects of the pandemic on the domestic rice supply vis-à-vis food security among ASEAN member-states. They found that Singapore and Malaysia were highly vulnerable to a pandemic-induced rice crisis, while Brunei, Indonesia, and the Philippines are moderately vulnerable. They argued that Southeast Asian rice importers should consider alternative import strategies to reduce their high-risk reliance on rice supply from Thailand and Vietnam and look for other suppliers in other continents.

Rice prices did not change in the early months of the pandemic in Indonesia (Nasir et al., 2021 ); however, as the health emergency progressed, distributors and wholesalers incurred additional costs due to pandemic-induced mobility restrictions (Erlina and Elbaar, 2021 ). In the Philippines, San Juan ( 2021 ) argues that the global rice supply disruption due to the pandemic proves that the country cannot heavily rely on rice imports; instead, it should work on strengthening its domestic rice supply. To realize this, he recommended drastic investments in agriculture and research, rural solar electrification, and the promotion of research on increasing rice yields, boosting productivity, and planting sustainably as feasible steps on the road to rice self-sufficiency.

The ways and extent to which the pandemic negatively affected or exacerbated the vulnerabilities of rice farmers and other value chain actors remain an understudied area in the social studies of rice. Scholars could study the pandemic’s impacts in conjunction with other contemporary and emerging challenges like climate change, weather extremes, aging, conflict, and poverty. Scholars could also explore the medium- and longer-term impacts of the pandemic on rice production, unemployment risks, rice supply and nutrition security of farming households, and the potential and extent to which economic stimulus can benefit rice farmers, to name a few. Most importantly, the pandemic allows researchers and governments to assess the business-as-usual approach that resulted in the disastrous impacts of the pandemic on different sectors, including rice farmers, and hopefully devise strategies to learn from these experiences.

From our review of 2243 articles, cumulatively written by 6893 authors using almost 80,000 references, we conclude that a voluminous amount of rice research has been conducted in Indonesia and the Philippines since 2001. As in other reviews, (e.g., on energy research by Sovacool, 2014 ), our results show that women scholars remain underrepresented in rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines. While interdisciplinary collaboration is abundant, most of these studies belong to the natural sciences with minimal contributions from the social sciences, arts, and humanities. University and research institutions contributed the most to rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines: from hybrid rice cultivars, water management, and technology adoption to socio-cultural, political, economic, and policy issues. Influential scholars in the field were affiliated with the IRRI, which can be expected given the institute’s focus on rice, and key agriculture-focused universities and government bureaus such as the University of the Philippines and the PhilRice in the Philippines, and the Institut Pertanian Bogor University and the Universitas Gadja Maja in Indonesia. We also discussed some examples of economic, political, and policy studies; social, anthropological, and cultural research; social and environmental psychology; climate change, weather extremes, and disaster risk reduction; demographic transitions; and contemporary and emerging issues and studies on rice in the two Southeast Asian countries. Ultimately, we hope that this systematic review can help illuminate key topic areas of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines and magnify the crucial contributions from and possible research areas and questions that interdisciplinary and comparative social scientists can further explore.

Data availability

The dataset analyzed in this study is available in the Figshare online repository via https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.17284814.v2 . All codes about Bibliometrix are available at https://bibliometrix.org/ .

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Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. HKUST 26600521). Partial funding was also made available by the HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies with support from EY.

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Cuaton, G.P., Delina, L.L. Two decades of rice research in Indonesia and the Philippines: A systematic review and research agenda for the social sciences. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 372 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01394-z

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Transformation of Rice-Growing Villages in the Philippines

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Rice-growing villages that look dormant under the shadow of mango trees have undergone a major transformation in their economies. Such transformation is accompanied by household income growth and poverty reduction. The first objective of this chapter is to describe the drivers of economic transformation in four villages (Kei’s villages) in the Philippines from simple rice-dependent economies to more complex ones characterized by diverse sources of livelihood. The drivers of these economic transformations are population pressure, new rice technology, land reform, investments in human capital, urbanization and commercialization, and infrastructure. The second objective is to explore the strategic processes that accompany such transformation, such as rising productivity of rice farming, production of high-value crops, and rising incidence of nonfarm work within the local economy and migration to local towns, big cities, and overseas, among the younger generation. An important finding is that in the course of transformation, participation in the nonfarm labor market and migration are the main pathways in moving out of poverty for the children of poor landless farmers.

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Economic transformation is widely observed to have been accompanied by rapid household income growth and poverty reduction. Economic transformation is the shift of the focus of economic activities away from agriculture to industry and services. This essay presents a picture of the economic transformation of four rice-growing villages in the Philippines (Kei’s villages). Professor Keijiro Otsuka practiced what Professor Yujiro Hayami fondly called ‘pedestrian economics,’ which is the art of studying the fabric of the rural economy by walking around the villages and interviewing households. Kei did several rounds of surveys in the villages for nearly two decades since Cristina C. David initiated the first one in 1985.

Kei’s villages that look dormant under the shadow of mango trees have undergone a major transformation in their economies. Such transformation is accompanied by household income growth and poverty reduction. The first objective of this essay is to describe the drivers of economic transformation in Kei’s villages from a simple rice-dependent economy to a more complex one characterized by diverse sources of livelihood. These drivers are population pressure, new rice technology, land reform, urbanization and commercialization, and infrastructure. The second objective is to explore the strategic processes that accompany such transformation, such as rising productivity of rice farming; production of high-value crops; rising incidence of nonfarm work among the younger generation within the local economy; and migration to local towns, big cities, and overseas. An important finding is that in the course of transformation, participation in the nonfarm labor market and migration are the main pathways in moving out of poverty for poor landless children of farmers.

Section 18.2 of this essay describes the villages and Sect. 18.3 identifies the drivers of transformation. Section 18.4 describes the strategic processes accompanying the transformation, and Sect. 18.5 documents income growth and poverty reduction. Finally, Sect. 18.6 is the concluding remarks.

2 Description of the Study Villages

Two of Kei’s study villages are located in Central Luzon (CL) (CL1 represents irrigated ecosystem, CL2 represents the lowland rainfed ecosystem), and two are located on Panay island (P) (P1 represents irrigated ecosystem, and P2 represents the upland). Footnote 1 Surveys were done in 1985 consisting of a randomly selected subsample of households in four villages. In 1993, 1997, and 2001, censuses of all households in the three villages (CL2, P1, and P2) were done. Mahabub Hossain, with funding from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), conducted the 1993, 1997, and 2001 surveys. Kei undertook surveys in the four villages in 2004 and 2008. Our descriptive tables show data from 1985 (the first survey) and 2008 (the last survey) when data are available for the four villages. In 1985, we had a total of 323 households and 1,330 in 2008. Households were grouped into two categories: (1) farmer households consisting of owner cultivators, leaseholders, and share tenants, and (2) landless households consisting of casual agricultural workers and non-agricultural households. Household grouping was based on the occupation of the household head.

3 Drivers of Transformation

3.1 population pressure.

Population pressure means a high growth rate of the labor force on a closed land frontier. One indication of population pressure is the increase in the proportion of landless households. The proportion of landless households rose more rapidly in the irrigated villages of CL1 and P1 because of the presence of greater employment opportunities in rice farming in irrigated ecosystems that attract migrant poor households. Average farm holding declined in all villages and more visibly in CL1. The increasing scarcity of farmland is expected to lead to impoverishment because farming is an important source of income.

3.2 New Rice Technology

Kei’s villages are characterized by a high rate of adoption of modern rice varieties as early as 1985 in CL1, CL2, and P1 because of their favorable production environments. CL1 and P1 are fully irrigated, while CL2 is favorable lowland, which became fully irrigated by the Casecnan irrigation system in 2008. Adoption in P2 was low in 1985 because it is in the upland, but then adoption rose to 100% in 2008 because of the release of new modern varieties (MVs) that can thrive in upland conditions.

3.3 Land Reform and Investments in Human Capital

The 1972 Philippine land reform program converted share tenants into leaseholders or amortizing owners, who received the Certificate of Land Transfer (CLT) title. Upon completion of the amortization fees, the CLT titleholders were conferred the Emancipation Patent (EP), a certificate of full ownership. The EP title is acceptable in outright land sales or as collateral for loans. Leasehold rent and amortization fees were set at a fixed rate during the program implementation. Rice yields since then rose because of the Green Revolution, so there was a divergence between the market rental value and actual land rent, or amortization fees (were created) (Otsuka 1991 ).

Pawning emerged for land under leasehold, CLT title, and EP. This is particularly observed in the irrigated villages of CL1 and P1, where rice yields rose considerably due to the diffusion of high-yielding varieties. Under the pawning arrangement, the farmer surrenders his land in exchange for money from a moneylender. The farmer usually becomes a share tenant of the moneylender on his own land until the farmer can pay off his loan.

Indeed, the pawning of land began in 1975, soon after the implementation of the land reform in the study villages in 1974. The proportion of area acquired by the respondents under pawning arrangements has since risen over time in Central Luzon. This can be traced to the rise in the pawning of land under the newly-acquired EP titles. Land reform was transformative because pawning revenues were used to finance children’s schooling, particularly tertiary schooling, and to finance the fixed cost of overseas migration (Estudillo et al. 2009 ). According to our village informants, farmers who pawned out their lands to finance schooling and overseas migration could repay their loans in less than five years to resume self-cultivation. The more educated children are then engaged in nonfarm work within the Philippines or migrate overseas, thereby diversifying household sources of income. Nonfarm work and migration then serve as important household risk coping mechanisms to buffer the uncertainty of agricultural income. As shown in Table 19.1 , the younger generation who obtained higher levels of schooling are those who are engaged in nonfarm work and overseas migration.

3.4 Urbanization and Commercialization

Kei’s villages experienced the wave of urbanization through the expansion of local towns, small cities, and big cities. CL1 and CL2 saw the creation of new villages nearby and within the jurisdiction of the city of Muñoz because of population growth. There was also the expansion of Cabanatuan City and San Jose, which are nearby cities, in terms of labor-intensive industries, including garments and food manufacturing. The expansion and rehabilitation of the North Luzon Expressways made it easy for workers in CL1 and CL2 to get employed in Manila. P1 benefited from the booming local economy of Pototan City and Iloilo City, which are fairly accessible to P1 via jeepney. In P2, villagers could find work in downtown Igbaras and Iloilo City primarily because of the newly-rehabilitated bridge that connects P2 to Igbaras town proper. Cable TV and internet connections expanded, bringing new ideas and values that transformed the traditional beliefs and norms in the villages.

In terms of commercialization, I witnessed the emergence of contract farming in okra production before the construction of the Casecnan irrigation system in CL2. Under this contract farming, the contractor provides all the inputs, such as seeds, fertilizer, and technology, while the farmer provides land and labor. Landless workers were employed in okra production, which decreased unemployment during slack periods in rice production.

3.5 Infrastructure

Kei’s villages experienced improvements in economic infrastructure, such as electricity, roads, bridges, and irrigation. The proportion of households with access to electricity in 2008 was 90% in CL1, 83% in CL2, 86% in P1, and 92% in P2.

There have been improvements in road length and quality since the first survey in 1985. Village roads were extended in remote areas within the village, while existing roads were upgraded from soil to asphalt in CL1, CL2, and P2. Being close to Iloilo City, P1 has had good quality roads since the 1980s. CL2 and P2 used to be isolated from the town proper by a river. A bridge was constructed in CL2 in 1992 and in P2 in 1995, making it convenient for the farmers to market their products and for others to work downtown and in nearby towns and cities. More importantly, children in CL2 and P2 were able to continue their schooling beyond the fourth grade. Before the bridge, primary schools in CL2 and P2 offered curriculum up to the fourth grade only. With the construction of the bridges in the two villages, school enrollment in high school rose remarkably in CL2 and P2.

CL2 used to be rainfed, while some farmers invested in portable water pumps to produce high-value crops, such as watermelon, onions, and other vegetables during the dry season. CL2 became fully irrigated in 2008 with the opening of the Casecnan irrigation system. Farmers can now plant rice in the dry season, increasing the cropping intensity and total rice production per year.

4 Strategic Processes that Accompany the Transformation

4.1 increasing productivity of rice farming, high-value crops, and livestock.

Rice yield rose because of the adoption of MVs and higher fertilizer application in all villages. There was an increase in total rice production in the four villages, partly because of yield increase and partly because of the adoption of shorter-duration MVs that enable farmers to have 2–3 crops per year. There was also an increase in the revenue from rice production because of the increase in rice prices due to the 2007–08 food crises. The spread of new rice technology is transformative because it enables farmers to secure food and allocate resources to children’s health and schooling. Otsuka et al. ( 2009 ) found that the increase in income from rice production was spent on children’s education, who, upon completing schoolwork, decided to work in the nonfarm sector in the locality or move to local towns, big cities, and overseas, and send remittances. The increase in nonfarm income was the major source of household income increase and poverty reduction.

The importance of rice income has declined due to the rice sector’s stagnant rice yield and declining employment opportunities because of the diffusion of labor-saving technologies. Production of high-value crops and livestock has become more common: the share of nonrice income among children living in the study villages was 19%, which is higher than the 15% share of rice income. So, it seems the economic importance of rice farming vis-à-vis other crops has declined in the traditional rice-growing villages.

4.2 Nonfarm Work and Migration

Here I discuss how poverty has declined over generations in Kei’s villages, as noted in the main findings of Estudillo et al. ( 2014 ). The most important strategy to halt the transmission of poverty from parents to children is for the younger generation to take advantage of new economic opportunities within the villages’ rural nonfarm economy or move out to explore job markets beyond the villages in local towns, big cities, and even overseas. Parents’ income has come mainly from agricultural sources, while children’s income has come largely from nonfarm sources. Initially, poverty was higher among landless households. Children from poor landless households could find their way out of poverty by acquiring more education, participating in the rural nonfarm labor market, and migrating to local towns, big cities, and overseas. Migrant children have higher total income coming mainly from nonfarm income.

To explore whether poverty has been transmitted from parents to children, it is necessary to have socioeconomic information on pairs of parents and children spanning at least two generations. Kei and I compiled information on three generations of members belonging to the same household in the four villages. Information from the first generation (G1), consisting of respondents’ parents, was taken from the 1985 survey conducted by IRRI. Data for the second-generation (G2) members, consisting of the respondents and their siblings, were taken from the 1989 survey conducted by Quisumbing ( 1994 ).

Kei and I constructed a specially designed questionnaire intended for personal in-house interviews of the third generation (G3), consisting of the daughters and sons of the respondents (G2). There were 3,218 respondents’ children that were reported in the original 1985 survey. We were able to trace the whereabouts of nearly half of them (1,516 children). We gave in-house interviews to 870 out of the 1,516 children (an interview rate of 57%) in their respective current places of residence in 2008. Migrant children tend to cluster in the northern and central parts of the country, where infrastructure is more developed and peace and order are not a problem.

We had a total of 535 individuals in G1; 1,485 individuals in G2; and 1,516 individuals in G3 (1,197 children of farmer households and 319 children of landless households). The tracking rate on the landless households was lower because landless households are geographically more mobile: many of them were not available at the time of the resurvey or were no longer residing in the study villages in 2008 with hardly any information on their whereabouts.

We categorized children into four groups based on their residential addresses at the time of the 2008 resurvey: (1) study villages, (2) local towns, (3) big cities, and (4) overseas. Footnote 2 Local towns refer to the poblacion (town center) of the study villages, adjacent villages, towns located in the same province, small cities nearby, and cities and towns in other provinces. Big cities include Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, and Baguio.

Table 18.1 shows the grouping of G1, G2, and G3 based on the type of job. For G1, we had the following classifications: (1) with a job in agriculture, (2) with a nonfarm job, (3) with an overseas job, and (4) unemployed and others. Almost all male G1 were engaged in agriculture, and almost all female parents were unemployed, mainly housekeepers. G1 were born around 1910, had very little schooling, and owned, on average, less than 1 hectare (ha) of farmland per person. Fathers completed more years of schooling than mothers (3.8 years vs. 3.1 years) and inherited larger areas of farmland (1.1 ha vs. 0.56 ha), indicating a gender bias in the transfer of wealth in favor of males.

For G2, we had the following groupings: (1) with a job in agriculture, (2) with a nonfarm job, (3) with a job in the big cities, (4) with an overseas job, and (5) unemployed and others. G2 were born around 1940, accomplished more than twice their parents’ education (6.9 vs. 3.4 years), and inherited about half the size of their parents’ farmland (0.39 ha vs. 0.83 ha). Brothers and sisters had about the same level of schooling, in contrast to their parents’ generation when females were less favored. Both female G2 and female G3 had become engaged in more diversified occupations, including overseas work.

We categorized G3 based on the parental endowment of farmland: (1) children originating from farmer households and (2) children from landless households. These two groups were further categorized into seven groups based on current residence and occupation: (1) with a job in agriculture in the study villages, (2) with a nonfarm job in the study villages, (3) with a job in agriculture in local towns, (4) with a nonfarm job in local towns, (5) with a job in the big cities, (6) with an overseas job, and (7) unemployed and others.

G3 were born in 1973 (1971–1975), had more than 10 years of schooling (3.3 years more than their parents), and had inherited farmland of less than 0.10 ha. Farmer children completed 0.4 more years of schooling than the landless children—a statistically significant difference ( p  < 0.05). A larger proportion of children from farmer households opted to stay in the study villages. Landless children were geographically more mobile, residing in the big cities, local towns, and overseas.

Children working overseas had the highest income, followed by those in the big cities; children who reside in the study villages had the lowest. Accordingly, poverty incidence and depth of poverty were highest among children living in the villages. That poverty did not exist among overseas children, while less than 10% of migrants in the big cities were poor. Migrant children were deeply engaged in nonfarm work; the largest proportion of their incomes had come from nonfarm income. Surprisingly, even those children who remain in the study villages derived 65% of their income from nonfarm sources, including nonfarm wage income (44%) and remittances and other sources (21%). Rice income has become a much less important source of income for G3, whereas, in contrast, it was the most important source, particularly for farmer households in the G2.

The correlation coefficient of parents’ and children’s schooling had declined from 0.30 between G1 and G2 to 0.20 between G2 and G3. Children of lowly educated parents tended to catch up with children of highly educated parents in terms of schooling, with male children benefiting more. The correlation coefficient between parental income and children’s income was close to zero. The coefficient of parental income in a regression function of children’s income was statistically insignificant with a value of −0.1187. Clearly, parental wealth has become weak in explaining children’s economic destiny.

Now we explore whether parental wealth affects children’s residential and occupational choices, which, in turn, affect children’s income. Education and inherited farmland are the major forms of wealth transfers that could potentially affect children’s residential and occupational preferences. For G2, we considered five alternative choices, and for G3, seven choices. Estudillo et al. ( 2014 ) performed a multinomial probit function and found that in G2 and G3, education positively and significantly affects the choice of nonfarm work and migration to the cities. For G2, education positively and significantly affects the choice of nonfarm work and migration to the cities. Children with larger inherited farmland are significantly more likely to work in agriculture and significantly less likely to engage in nonfarm work and migrate to the cities.

For G3, the more educated children are more likely to engage in nonfarm work in the village and local towns and migrate to the big cities and overseas: they are less likely to engage in agricultural work in the village and local towns. Like G2, children with larger inherited farmland are more likely to choose farming in villages and local towns.

The main finding is that schooling has enabled G2 and G3 to explore job opportunities in the nonfarm sector in the village and local towns and has prepared them to migrate to big cities and overseas. Inherited farmland remains a decisive factor in choosing farming vis-à-vis other occupations in the village and local towns. Since landless children in G3 obtained schooling levels less than but comparable with that of farmer children, it is reasonable to expect that they are equally likely to explore job opportunities in the nonfarm labor market in the village, local towns, and the big cities. In fact, landless children have a higher propensity to migrate in search of economic opportunities elsewhere outside the village.

For G3, education significantly increases nonfarm household income, whereas the size of inherited farmland significantly increases farm income. Interestingly, inherited farmland does not affect the total household income of G3, which indicates that landless children are not necessarily worse off even if they did not inherit farmland. Education has facilitated the participation of landless children in nonfarm employment and migration to big cities and local towns. These strategies led to increased income, notably earned from nonfarm labor activities. As a result, poverty has declined among landless children, and the income gap between farmers’ children and landless children has declined.

5 Income Growth and Poverty Reduction

Table 18.2 shows the sources of household income of G2 in 1985 and those of their children (G3) in 2008, classified as coming from farmer or landless households. Sources of household income were the following: (1) rice income, consisting of income from rice production and from off-farm wage activities; (2) nonrice farm income, coming from the production of nonrice crops, livestock, and poultry; (3) nonfarm income, consisting of wage income from nonfarm activities, such as formal and informal salary work and from self-employed activities in trade, transport, and communication; and (4) domestic and foreign remittances. Income data are in purchasing power parity (PPP) at 2005 USD prices.

In 1985, a substantial portion of household income of G2 (76% for farmer households, 49% for landless households) came from agricultural sources, such as the production of rice, nonrice crops, and livestock (Table 18.2 ). The income of farmer households was about twice the income of landless households. The major sources of disparity were rice and nonrice crop production. Nonfarm income was higher for the landless. And because the landless are land-poor, poverty was higher among the landless (65%) than among the farmer households (42%). Footnote 3

Interestingly, nonfarm income has become the major income source of farmer children (G3)—67% of their income—while it was only 12% of their parents’ (G2). The income disparity between the farmer and landless households appears to have disappeared in G3, with nonfarm income as the major driver of income growth. Meanwhile, income from rice and nonrice farming remained significantly higher for the farmer children.

The children’s and parents’ income ratio in the landless category was 7.4 times. In contrast, the corresponding ratio for the farmer was only 4.1, an indication of substantial income growth for the landless children. While children’s incomes have largely equalized, poverty incidence among the landless children remained higher, but at a mere 8% points, compared with their parents, in which poverty stood at 23% points higher among the landless class. Landless children who migrated to local towns and big cities increased their income vis-à-vis that of farmer children.

6 Concluding Remarks

This chapter identified the drivers of transformation and explored the accompanying strategic processes in Kei’s four villages in the Philippines. There was income growth and poverty reduction, and there was no transmission of poverty from parents to children. There was also a decline in income inequality between the rich (farming households) and the poor (landless households). Participation in the nonfarm labor market and migration to local towns and big cities are the main pathways to moving out of poverty for the landless poor. Poverty among the landless poor declined substantially because they have a higher degree of geographical and occupational mobility.

The experience of Kei’s villages attests to the power of economic transformation to penetrate the lives and livelihood of rural people. There are no losers in Kei’s villages—‘the rising tide lifted all boats’—the landless poor benefiting more. It is obvious that to improve the lot of the landless poor, they need more than just the virtue of frugality, initiative, and enterprise. The poor needed education, farmland, infrastructure, and local towns and cities, strategies that increased income, notably income earned from nonfarm labor services, that allowed them to move out of poverty.

These villages were randomly selected from an extensive survey of 50 villages representing irrigated and lowland production environments in Luzon and Panay Island.

Parts of this section draw heavily from Estudillo et al. ( 2014 ).

We were able to interview 27 children who were already residing overseas, as it happened that they were visiting the study villages at the time of our survey.

Poverty measures are estimated using the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke index (Foster et al. 1984 ) with the USD 1.25 per capita per day in purchasing power parity based on private consumption as the poverty line.

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This research is partially supported by the Philippine Center for Economic Development.

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Estudillo, J.P. (2023). Transformation of Rice-Growing Villages in the Philippines. In: Estudillo, J.P., Kijima, Y., Sonobe, T. (eds) Agricultural Development in Asia and Africa. Emerging-Economy State and International Policy Studies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5542-6_18

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The current phenomenon is the need for farmer regeneration involving the younger generation due to a decrease in human resources in the agricultural sector. The current younger generation is not interested in agricultural activities because of the unfavorable perception of the world of agriculture. In line with these problems, this study aims to: (1) describe the level of interest of students in agriculture, (2) analyze the factors that influence students' interest in agriculture, and (3) formulate strategies to increase students' interest in agriculture as an effort to regenerate farmer. This quantitative descriptive research was carried out from March to June 2022 in Tarogong Kidul District, involving 80 students as the sample from a population of 335 people. The Slovin formula with a 10 percent gallate is used to determine the sample. Data collection uses a questionnaire containing closed questions according to the parameters of the research variables and indicators. Before being used as a data collection tool, the questionnaire was tested for validity and reliability. Data analysis was carried out in two ways, namely descriptive statistical analysis and multiple linear regression analysis. The results showed that most of the students (76.25%) considered that they were not fully interested in agriculture. Factors that influence students' interest (α 0.01) are the role of parents, while knowledge of agriculture, motivation, and the role of friends have a significant effect on α 0.05. The strategy to increase students' interest in agriculture is to involve parents and friends to guide and encourage students in agricultural activities so that they have knowledge and are motivated in agriculture.

All time Top

Florencia G Palis

This paper presents an assessment of needs and coping mechanisms of small-scale rice farmers in the Philippines. Various ethnographic methods were used in the study. Focus group discussions among farmers and key informant interviews among agricultural staff and extension workers were conducted in 51 villages of 19 municipalities in six provinces of the country. Household survey was conducted among 923 farmers in the provinces of Agusan del Norte, Iloilo and Isabela. The major needs faced by small-scale Filipino rice farmers ranged from overcoming biotic and abiotic stresses, economic sufficiency, structural sufficiency and enhanced knowledge in rice farm management & technologies. Sufficient capital prevailed to be the most common need in rice farming. Other specific needs include low input cost, higher paddy price, access to equipment and post-harvest facilities, adequate irrigation system, farm-to-market roads, overcoming biotic stresses such as pests and diseases, overcoming abiotic stresses such as flooding and drought, and improved knowledge on rice farm management and technologies. Some needs and constraints were found to be location-specific such as biotic and abiotic stresses, but were interrelated. Adoption of key technologies promoted in the PalayCheck system to increase rice production remains a great challenge since these technologies such as the site specific nutrient management are closely interrelated with timely availability of sufficient financial capital. Farmers were found to manage and cope by borrowing money from informal lenders who charge them with high interest rates, and traders that require farmers to sell their produce immediately after harvest with a low paddy price. These situations entrapped our rice farmers in a cycle of poverty, hence pro-farmer policies and programs that addressed real needs of farmers should be in place: easy access to formal financial institutions with low interest rates and simplified credit requirements; a competitive price for paddy; reduction in costs of inputs; livelihood programs to farmers and their households; access to post-harvest facilities; better irrigation systems and road infrastructures; and most of all, strengthening farmer organizations. A working multi-stakeholder partnership among farmer organizations, Department of Agriculture and local government units are imperative in addressing the needs of farmers to increase rice production, farming households' income and achieving the country's goal of rice self-sufficiency.

European Journal of Social Sciences Studies

cathy cadusale

Farming is a multifaceted activity that involves various farming challenges and opportunities and their experiences were honed by various elements such as marketing strategies, technological innovations, and cultural features are very essential to develop more farmer-centric interventions that support sustainable and gender-responsive agriculture. This study utilized a qualitative design bound by a grounded theory approach by means of purposive sampling representing the group of Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries of Davao City, Davao Del Sur, Philippines. The study revealed five themes following factors (1) Production assistance (2) Full marketing support through cooperative membership (3) Lack of management strategy (4) Lack of financial assistance and market linkages (5) Lease agreements from ARBs to high-end operational agricultural plantations. The following results show the remaining gaps and areas of concern that must be highly provided by policy interventions and streamlined proce...

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Filipino Rice Farmers: What We Can Learn from their Struggle

The complex situation of filipino rice farmers.

How does a country like the Philippines, with a long history of rice production employing a significant chunk of its population, become the number one importer of rice, beating even China? It is a long and complex story, of course, and one that doesn’t always center the Filipino rice farmers themselves.

It is a story of tax reforms, import regulations, and a government’s choices and regarding its people.

Over the past two to three decades, many factors have negatively impacted rice farming in the Philippines. These include human negligence and natural disasters to name a couple. However, the industry suffered the most significant hit at the hands of its own government. Filipino government implemented a policy allegedly intended to improve conditions for all Filipinos, including Filipino rice farmers.

How Policy Affects Filipino Rice Farmers

This policy was the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL). They ratified it in February 2019.  Quota restrictions previously controlled rice imports. This law opened up these imports completely and only an import tariff regulated them. The government stated that purpose of this new law was to stop rapid inflation. The aim was to support food security for all Filipinos, and not only protecting the smaller group of Filipino rice producers. Inflation did indeed slow. Allegedly, the benefits for the general population, such as lower prices for rice, would by far outweigh losses in the rice production sector. However, the Federation of Free Farmers , an organization created in 1953 to bring about nonviolent reform to support peasants’ rights, conducted a study on the matter. They revealed that farmers are in a much worse situation now than they were prior to the RTL.

Under this new rice law, a significant portion of the tariff on rice imports was intended to support the modernization and improvement of local rice farming practices. These improvements should have included specialized machinery and other subsidies. The idea was to boost production and thus make Filipino rice farmers more competitive, both locally and internationally. Sadly, one year after the implementation of the law, the promised machinery has yet to be delivered. Several other promises remain unfulfilled as well.

Shifting Agriculture & Social Dynamics

Currently, Filipino rice farmers and their families find themselves seeking other employment in urban areas. They are mostly finding work in construction, food services, factories, and domestic work. These jobs don’t necessarily offer better income than rice farming, but they do provide more stability, and moreover often include non-monetary benefits such as health insurance and paid leave. The migration of farmworkers to cities translates into abandoned farmland, sometimes repurposed for other uses, including real-estate development.

Questions arise:

Is the gradual elimination of local agricultural production going to ensure food security for a rapidly growing population of over 100 million people?

Is the government acting in the interest of all of its people?

Small movements towards organic agriculture offer glimmers of hope as the global trend of sustainable food systems that care for the soil, water, and environment slowly gains traction. Within this framework, “the old ways” are embraced and combined with new eco-friendly technologies and practices.

The Greater Population or Those Who Feed Them?

Right now, given the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that the government will continue to focus on how to feed the majority of its population, rather than on how to improve the situation of the roughly three million people whose livelihoods depend on growing rice. At the beginning of April of this year, the Philippine government signed an agreement with Vietnam, the world’s third largest rice exporter, to secure a continuous supply of as much as 300,000 tons of rice.

In times of crisis, urgent and immediate matters demand attention, often at the expense of more sustainable and longer-term planning. Depending on how long this global pandemic lasts, and as the food supply chain becomes increasingly strained by transport restrictions, the importance of having a healthy local production to guarantee food security may become more apparent.

Contemplating possible solutions? You can head over to this recent story and learn the steps proposed by the Producers Market team to help innovate and strengthen our value chains during disruptive times.

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• Philippines
• sustainable practices

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Rice Farming Importance in the Philippines

This sample paper on Rice Farming Essay offers a framework of relevant facts based on the recent research in the field. Read the introductory part, body and conclusion of the paper below.

I. Introduction The most important food crop in the Philippines is rice, a staple food in most of the country. It is produced all throughout Luzon, the Western Visayas, Southern Mindanao, and Central Mindanao. 9. 5 billion tons of palay were produced in 1989 almost. In 1990 palay, which caused a 27 percent value added in agriculture and 3.

5 percent of GNP. Per hectare yields have generally been low in comparison with other Asian countries.

Since the mid-1960s, however, yields have increased substantially as a result of the cultivation of high-yielding varieties developed in the mid-1960s at the International Rice Research Institute located in the Philippines. The proportion of “miracle” rice in total output rose from zero in 1965-66 to 81 percent in 1981-82. Average productivity increased to 2. 3 tons per hectare (2. 8 tons on irrigated farms) by 1983.

By the late 1970s, the country had changed from a net importer to a net exporter of rice, albeit on a small scale.

In the 1980s, however, rice production encountered problems. Average annual growth for 1980-85 declined to a mere 0. 9 percent, as contrasted with 4. 6 percent for the preceding fifteen years. Growth of value added in the rice industry also fell in the 1980s. Tropical storms and droughts, the general economic downturn of the 1980s, and the 1983-85 economic crisis all contributed to this decline. Crop loans dried up, prices of agricultural inputs increased, and palay prices declined.

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Fertilizer and plant nutrient consumption dropped 15 percent.

Why Rice Essay

Farmers were squeezed by rising debts and declining income. Hectarage devoted to rice production, level during the latter half of the 1970s, fell an average of 2. 4 percent per annum during the first half of the 1980s, with the decline primarily in marginal, nonirrigated farms. As a result, in 1985, the last full year of the Marcos regime, the country imported 538,000 tons of rice. The situation improved somewhat in the late 1980s, and smaller amounts of rice were imported. However, in 1990 the country experienced a severe drought.

Output fell by 1. 5 percent, forcing the importation of an estimated 400,000 tons of rice. In few years, we may have to squeeze out whatever is left of the country’s rice stock. This paper aims to find out what factors affect the production of rice in the Philippines to be able to formulate policies which may give the Filipinos more than enough hope and promise to help Filipinos on the way not only to rice sustainability, but also to national food security. II. Statement of the problem and object of the analysis

General: This paper attempts to analyze Palay Production in the Philippines from the first semester of 1991 to the second semester of 2002 as affected by the size of land used for planting palay, amount of rain, and advancement of technology. Specific: More specification, this paper answers the following questions: 1. Does each of the following variables has significant effect on Palay Production. a. Area of land allotted for planting palay. b. Amount of rainfall. c. Advancement of technology. 2.

Is there a significant effect on rice production given that the area of land allotted for planting palay, amount of rainfall, and advancement of technology are combined. III. Specification of the model This paper utilized a multiple linear regression model which can be described as follows: PROD = b0 + b1AREA + b2RAIN + b3TECH Where: b = parameters estimates PROD = volume of rice produced AREA = area of land allotted for planting palay RAIN = amount of rainfall in the areas TECH = advancement of technology in the agricultural sector Furthermore, to determine the individual level of significance of every ndependent variable, the t-statistic will be used. In order to estimate the values of coefficient, the Least Square Method was used, with a confidence level of 95 percent, while to probe into to over-all significance to these variables to the dependent one, the f-statistic was used. Finally, the results are to be validated through the usage of R2 which determines the degree of influence of all variables to the dependent component. The level of significance used in this study is 5 percent, while the degrees of freedom is 21, derived by deducting the number of observations (24) by the number of independent variables in consideration (3).

IV. Hypothesis To Be Tested That the variables such as area allotted for planting palay, amount of rainfall, advancement of technology in the agricultural sector have no significant effect on rice production in the Philippines. V. Presentation of Data The Table below shows the data from the first semester of 1991 to the second semester of 2002, showing figures about palay production, area harvested, amount of rainfall and the advancement of technology. Palay ProductionArea HarvestedRainfallTechnology (All Ecosystem, In Metric Tons)(All Ecosystem, In Hectares)(in millimeters)Trend variable

PRODAREARAINTECH 1991. 1 4,047,513 1,418,640 6,674. 0 1 1991. 2 5,625,749 2,006,320 13,124. 0 2 1992. 1 3,505,984 1,282,330 6,623. 7 3 1992. 2 5,622,956 1,915,740 16,278. 0 4 1993. 1 3,890,149 1,320,700 6,319. 8 5 1993. 2 5,544,059 1,961,650 18,756. 5 6 1994. 1 4,378,533 1,483,330 10,362. 5 7 1994. 2 6,159,521 2,168,200 13,995. 8 1995. 1 4,317,331 1,501,408 7,510. 3 9 1995. 2 6,223,318 2,257,283 21,217. 0 10 1996. 1 4,950,910 1,666,483 10,704. 3 11 1996. 2 6,332,658 2,284,653 16,258. 0 12 1997. 1 4,846,461 1,624,241 7,303. 0 13 1997. 2 6,422,502 2,218,029 11,052. 9 14 1998. 1 3,558,976 1,283,197 4,974. 4 15 1998. 2 4,995,848 1,886,845 24,330. 5 16 1999. 5,272,053 1,743,026 19,011. 6 17 1999. 2 6,514,572 2,256,813 26,291. 3 18 2000. 1 5,442,496 1,737,623 17,458. 1 19 2000. 2 6,946,916 2,300,462 27,202. 0 20 2001. 1 5,567,831 1,729,096 13,767. 5 21 2001. 2 7,387,039 2,336,345 23,721. 0 22 2002. 1 5,672,369 1,753,200 10,637. 3 23 2002. 2 7,598,284 2,293,118 20,401. 0 24 Prod = f(area, rain, tech) VI.

Summary of Findings After processing the gathered data into information, through the regression analysis, AREA, RAIN, TECH, and PROD, gave off the following estimated regression equation and other regression results: PROD = -282911 + 2. 959577AREA – 14. 77746RAIN + 37848. 18TECH The equation states that at every 1hectar increase in Area, there would be a 2. 959577 metric ton increase in rice production. Ceteris paribus. It also shows a negative relation between rainfall and rice production, were an increase of 1mm. Of rain fall would cause a decrease of 14. 7746hectars of rice, ceteris paribus. Finally, the equation also indicates a positive relation between technological advancements to rice production. As technology has a 1 unit increase, rice production would increase by 37848. 18. Dependent Variable: PROD Method: Least Squares Date: 07/12/04 Time: 23:04 Sample: 1991:1 2002:2 Included observations: 24 VariableCoefficientStd. Errort-StatisticProb. C-282911. 0334520. 1-0. 8457220. 4077 AREA2. 9595770. 24752211. 956820. 0000 RAIN-14. 7774613. 73005-1. 0762860. 2946 TECH37848. 188842. 3054. 2803520. 0004

R-squared0. 954369 Mean dependent var5451001. Adjusted R-squared0. 947524 S. D. dependent var1137085. S. E. of regression260478. 8 Akaike info criterion27. 92944 Sum squared resid1. 36E+12 Schwarz criterion28. 12578 Log likelihood-331. 1533 F-statistic139. 4325 Durbin-Watson stat1. 048045 Prob(F-statistic)0. 000000 The regressed data show that only the amount of rainfall has no significant effect on the dependent variable, as shown by the variables’ t-statistic. It did not meet the critical value of 2. 080 with a t-statistic of 1. 76286. All in all, the whole estimated equation is highly significant as shown by the f-statistic of 0. 0000. There is a 0. 954369 R-squared data, which shows that there is a 95. 44% influence of independent variables to the dependent variable. This graph shows the trend of Rice Production in the Philippines and amount of Rainfall during 1991 to 2002. As one can observe, rice production and rainfall are almost going at the same trend, but when there was a massive amount of rainfall during 1998, rice production slowed it’s ascend to it’s peak.

This graph shows the trend of rice production and area for planting palay from the first semester of 1991 to the second semester of 2002. as we can observe, the graphs are almost overlapping each other, except during 1998, where rice production slowed during the beginning of the second semester. VII. Conclusion With the country’s fast increase in population and the slow pace of our technology and limited land area, the rice our farmers are producing are not sufficient to feed all of our “kababayans” and have more to sell throughout the world.

Policy makers should try to formulate policies that would help increase rice production. The input requirements of the new technologies were skewed, in the direction of capital inputs, mainly irrigated land, fertilizers and other forms of capital. By definition, capital is scarce, and therefore the implementation of the new technologies stretched over a long period of time. This is on the supply side, whereas on the demand side, the countries have to expand their export in order to supplement the growing domestic demand in absorbing the growing supply.

The message for the future is clear, for the growth to continue, the available technologies must continue to grow. Without such growth, the impact of input growth will eventually decline; we see some evidence to this effect already in the estimated regression equation. But this is not the only determinant of future growth. In order to take a full advantage of new techniques, there must be a smooth flow of the required resources into agriculture. VIII. Bibliography Economic Development 8th edition, by Michael s. Todaro and Stephen C. Smith, page 418-454 Agricultural Statistics c/o San Beda College Prof. Harold Glenn Valera

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While they may complain about the price of rice in supermarkets or enjoy so-called  unli-rice  meals at their favorite fast-food chains, urban Filipinos don’t always appreciate just how crucial rice is to our culture and way of life. And it’s not just because we’re among the world’s biggest consumers of rice per capita. More than a tenth of Filipinos rely on rice as a source of income as well as sustenance.

By some estimates, there are 10 million rice farmers in the Philippines, a country of just over 100 million. When you include people in rice trade and processing, as well the dependents of everyone in the rice business, you begin to see how much of the social and economic impact of  rice in the Philippines . 

Unfortunately, rice farmers, the very people we Filipinos depend on for the bulk of our caloric requirements, are among the most disadvantaged in the country. Decades of systemic problems have resulted in a situation where farmers are finding it harder and harder to make a living. Below are some of the serious challenges Filipino rice farmers face.

1.) High Input Costs

Many Filipino farmers are simply unable to take their production further due to the high expense of many critical inputs. Compounding this is the low  palay  prices that could be expected after harvesting, which keeps many farmers in a perpetual state of struggle and often in serious debt. 

Partly due to market forces and exploitative practices, basics such as fertilizers, high-yield seed grains, and mechanized farm equipment are prohibitively priced for many farmers, who must then struggle harder to produce a profitable crop through more labor-intensive methods. Advanced farm inputs such as agricultural drones and AI and data-driven farming, which would save labor and prevent waste, are even more out of reach. 

2.) Lack of Post-Harvest Facilities 

Most of the crop losses of farmers are post-harvest. This has been largely attributed to the historically poor private and public investment in infrastructure that can prevent these losses.

The lack of storage facilities, farm-to-market roads, and equipment needed to prevent losses from exposure, pests, and natural deterioration have been perennial issues for Filipino farmers. 

The lack of these facilities and equipment makes it difficult for most farmers to produce enough to turn in a profit, as these losses destroy a significant portion of crops even before they make it to market.

Additionally, the lack of these basic amenities makes it difficult or even impossible for farmers to earn enough to ensure a succeeding harvest without needing to take on significant loans.

3.) Climate Change

Climate change is causing seasonal typhoons to happen more frequently and with more ferocity while leading to dry seasons with unheard-of high temperatures. Both of these situations are damaging enough for most farms’ productivity. However, the negative effects of climate change do not stop there. 

Climate change has also led to rising sea levels, a serious matter in an archipelagic country with a population that mostly resides and farms in the lowlands. Signs of saltwater intrusion have already been detected all over the country, in most of its so-called “rice bowls,” with experts predicting a crisis before the end of the decade. If it comes to pass, it could render millions of hectares of riceland unsuitable for most of today’s widely used rice cultivars.

4.) Market Forces

The market for rice has changed much over the past generation. Not only are cheaper imports from Vietnam and other Asian countries pricing Filipino farmers out, but domestic rice consumption has also been dropping slowly over the past few decades.

Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, the cost of necessary inputs only continues to rise. This has created severe pressures for rice farmers throughout the country, causing many to abandon farming to take their chances in the country’s urban centers.

5.) Land Rent

While land rent could be considered as another high-input cost, this is a uniquely serious issue given its political nature and also because most Filipino farmers do not own the land they cultivate.

Most of the ASEAN had implemented agrarian land reform policies decades ago to ensure not only food security but also better lives for their farmers. The Philippines has been late in implementing its own watered-down take on land distribution. The result is many farmers receive too little, too late and are often motivated to sell whatever land they do receive.

6.) Demographics

Fewer and fewer farmers want their children to have the life that they do. As a result, most of them do everything they can to ensure their children get better-paying jobs, often in the cities. As a result, the average age of Filipino farmers is 53, as few younger people are willing to take up farming. This means that productivity per farmer can be expected to fall, especially for such physically demanding crops as rice.

This is not an issue unique to the Philippines. Japan’s farmers, for instance, have an average age of 66. While more automation and technology more than made up for the labor shortfall in Japan’s case, it is doubtful that the same could be said of the Philippines, as the foundations for more widespread technology adoption are still in the process of being built. 

While these issues are very serious, there have also been major inroads made towards mitigating or even solving them. Investment in farms and farmers continues to rise, albeit slowly, and new labor and cost-efficient methods are continuously being adopted by Filipinos at all points of the agricultural supply chain.

But while there is hope for the future, many Filipino rice farmers today will continue to face these issues — even as they feed a country that does not always appreciate them.

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IRRI, PhilRice launch drone protocols to boost rice farming in the Philippines

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LOS BAÑOS, Laguna (17 April 2024) – Aimed at leveraging the power of drone technology to boost farmers’ productivity and sustainability, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Department of Agriculture - Philippine Rice Research Institute (DA-PhilRice) have launched the Drones4Rice Project during the Inception Workshop held at the IRRI Headquarters in Los Baños, Laguna on 16-17 April 2024.

The Drones4Rice Project will craft standardized protocols for drone applications of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides for rice production in the Philippines. Implementing optimized protocols and streamlined regulations will enable the private sector to scale affordable drone services to farmers. The initiative holds significant potential for elevating farmers' productivity, income, and resilience by advocating precision agriculture and sustainable rice farming practices.

The project also plans to set up a drone-based system to monitor crops, and map weeds and nutrient levels in rice fields to develop a new method for adjusting nutrient and weed management during the growing season, as well as scaling up sustainable drone-based precision farming technologies and finding ways to adopt them widely at the farm cluster level.

Drones serve various agricultural purposes, including irrigation planning, crop health monitoring, damage assessment, soil health analysis, and fertilizer and pesticide application. Equipped with advanced sensors, they can provide real-time data to detect moisture levels, assess crop health, and optimize resource management, helping enhance productivity and reduce labor costs.

Across Asia, drones are employed in agricultural regions of China and Japan and are increasingly gaining traction in neighboring nations like Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. In the Philippines, use of drones in agriculture is at its early stages and this multi-stakeholder partnership aims to accelerate access to this technology by smallholder farmers.

One of the reasons cited for the large difference in rice production cost between the Philippines and major rice exporting countries is labor cost – accounting for about a third of the total rice production costs. Mechanization and a shift toward precision agriculture can significantly drive the rice production cost to go down.

“Precision agriculture, including the use of drone technology, can optimize input usage like seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, leading to higher yields and cost efficiency,” said IRRI Senior Scientist Stephen Klassen, one of the project leads.

“Drones4Rice emphasizes the rice industry’s need to adapt to emerging trends and technologies, with digital transformation being a key strategy of the Masagana Rice Industry Development Program. It is crucial for our industry to stay current,”  Engr. Christopher V. Morales, DA Undersecretary for Rice Industry Development, said during the event.

During the workshop, farmer leaders from different parts of the CALABARZON (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, and Quezon) witnessed drone demonstrations and provided their feedback on how they can utilize drones.

“The drones will be a huge help for farmers like us because we can save on seedlings and labor costs. Hopefully, the technology is accessible and affordable enough to encourage farmers beyond this group to utilize it,” said Enrico Amparo, a farmer leader from San Juan, Batangas.

Funded by DA-National Program through the Bureau of Agricultural Research (DA-BAR), the project is set to be institutionalized by national partners including DA attached agencies and bureaus, and DA Regional Offices (2, IVA and 5), in collaboration with private sector service providers and regulatory agencies such as the Fertilizer and Pesticide Authority (FPA), Civil Aviation Authority Philippines (CAAP) and Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB).  

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PhilRice reminds farmers to harvest rice at the right time

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• by Camille Nagaño
• Apr. 24, 2024 10:28 am in News

SCIENCE CITY OF MUÑOZ (PIA) -- The Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) reminds farmers to harvest rice crops at the right time.

This is in line with the agency's PalayCheck System, specifically Key Check 8, which focuses on rice crop harvesting at the appropriate time. 

PhilRice Rice Engineering and Mechanization Division Supervising Science Research Specialist Elmer Bautista said the right timing of harvest results in good quality rice grains, leading to higher prices in the market and preference from consumers.

"When harvesting is done too early, many grains may be wasted, resulting in less rice yield during milling, and it can also cause harvest losses. Meanwhile, when harvesting is done too late, many grains may fall off, get damaged during milling, and can also lead to harvest losses," he explained.

As such, PhilRice shared the recommendations for proper rice harvesting at the right time.

First, farmers are advised to drain the field one to two weeks before the expected date of harvesting.

“This is to attain uniform maturity and ripening of grains, to prevent wetting of grains during harvesting, and for easy operation in the field,” Bautista said. 

Second, it is recommended to harvest rice at the right maturity when 85 to 90 percent (if manual harvest) or 90 to 95 percent (if using a combine harvester) of the grains are golden yellow.

Third, farmers should harvest at the right grain moisture content (MC). 

Bautista recommended the use of a grain moisture meter when available. “During the dry season, harvest the rice at 18 to 21 percent moisture content; 20 to 25 percent moisture content during the wet season," he noted.

Lastly, after manual harvesting, farmers are encouraged to thresh the rice within a day during the wet season and within two days during the dry season.

Bautista emphasized the importance of not storing the harvested crop in the field for more than a day because this may lead to heat buildup, grain discoloration, and low-quality milled rice.

He added that farmers should avoid threshing dripping-wet rice using a mechanical thresher to prevent losses from poor grain cleaning and separation.

Farmers are likewise urged to observe the recommended threshing speed, 800 rpm for most engine-driven threshers, to thresh properly and prevent grain damage. 

“More may be finished with fast engine operation, but this will result in a faster blower speed which will increase separation losses,” Bautista pressed. 

By following these recommendations, farmers can expect a decrease in crop losses; a reduction in loosening and immature grains; prevention of discoloration, cracking, and grain breakage; as well as protection against pest damage.

For additional information, farmers may contact the PhilRice text center hotline at 0917-111-7423 or visit the official website at www.philrice.gov.ph. (CLJD/MAECR-PIA 3)

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April 25, 2024

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Philippine court blocks GMO 'golden rice' production over safety fears

A Philippine court has blocked the commercial propagation of genetically modified golden rice because it said conflicting scientific views gave rise to "severe" health and environmental safety concerns.

The Philippines was the first country in the world to approve golden rice , which is enriched with the Vitamin A precursor beta-carotene and has a bright yellow color, in a bid to combat childhood blindness.

However, the Court of Appeals in Manila revoked a biosafety permit for commercial production of the rice granted by government regulators in 2021 after 14 opponents filed a challenge.

The court's ruling, issued on April 17 and seen by AFP on Thursday, also applies to a genetically modified eggplant, BT eggplant, that is pest resistant.

"By reason of the conflicting scientific views and uncertainties on the risks and effects of Golden Rice and Bt Eggplant, potential severe and grave threats to the welfare of people and the environment arise," the court said.

Commercial propagation was not allowed "until such time that the concerned respondent government agencies submit proof of safety and compliance with all legal requirements", it said.

Experts hope the rice will help combat childhood blindness and save lives in the developing world .

World Health Organization data show vitamin A deficiency causes up to 500,000 cases of childhood blindness every year, mostly in developing countries, with half of those dying within 12 months of losing their sight.

Golden rice was developed over two decades by the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Department of Agriculture-Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), while BT eggplant was developed by the University of the Philippines Los Banos campus.

The scientists involved insist both are safe to eat. PhilRice executive director John de Leon said in a statement the institute was "reviewing the implications" of the ruling to prepare its response.

The IRRI said it would continue to work with PhilRice on "developing safe and effective nutritional interventions through rice research".

It also said golden rice had received "positive food safety evaluations" from regulators in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.

However, the rice faced strong resistance from environmental groups opposed to genetically altered food plants and at least one test field in the Philippines was attacked by activists.

The opponents who filed the objection, including Greenpeace, welcomed the ruling.

"This decision is a monumental win for Filipino farmers and Filipino people who have for decades stood up against genetically modified crops," Greenpeace Southeast Asia campaigner Wilhelmina Pelegrina said in a statement.

"GM crops have never been proven safe, and have hindered necessary progress on climate resilient ecological agriculture that keeps the control of seeds on our farmers."

Ordinary rice, a staple for hundreds of millions of people, particularly in Asia, produces beta-carotene in the plant but it is not found in the grain.

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How Vietnam’s farmers are untangling the rice paradox—a crop that suffers deeply from climate change is also a major contributor

There is one thing that distinguishes 60-year-old Vo Van Van’s rice fields from a mosaic of thousands of other emerald fields across Long An province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta: It isn’t entirely flooded.

That and the giant drone, its wingspan similar to that of an eagle, chuffing high above as it rains organic fertilizer onto the knee-high rice seedlings billowing below.

Using less water and using a drone to fertilize are new techniques that Van is trying and  Vietnam hopes will help solve a paradox at the heart of growing rice: The finicky crop isn’t just vulnerable to climate change but also contributes uniquely to it.

Rice must be grown separately from other crops and seedlings have to be individually planted in flooded fields; backbreaking, dirty work requiring a lot of labor and water that generates a lot of methane,  a potent planet-warming gas  that can trap more than 80-times more heat in the atmosphere in the short term than carbon dioxide.

It’s a problem unique to growing rice, as inundated fields stop oxygen from entering the soil, creating the conditions for methane-producing bacteria. Rice paddies contribute 8% of all human-made methane in the atmosphere,  according to a 2023 Food and Agriculture Organization report .

Vietnam is the world’s third-largest rice exporter , and the staple importance to Vietnamese culture is palpable in the Mekong Delta. The fertile patchwork of green fields crisscrossed by silvery waterways has helped stave off famine since the Vietnam War ended in 1975. Rice isn’t just the  mainstay of most meals , it is considered a gift from the gods and continues to be venerated.

It is molded into noodles and sheets and fermented into wine. In busy markets, motorcyclists lug 10-kilogram (22-pound) bags to their homes. Barges haul mountains of the grain up and down the Mekong River. Rice kernels are then dried and hulled by machines before they’re packed for sale in factories, lined from floor to ceiling with sacks of rice.

Van has been working with one of Vietnam’s largest rice exporters, the Loc Troi Group, for the past two years and is using a different method of irrigation known as alternate wetting and drying, or AWD. This requires less water than traditional farming since his paddy fields aren’t continuously submerged. They also produce less methane.

Using the drone to fertilize the crops saves on labor costs. With  climate shocks pushing a migration to cities , Van said that it’s harder to find people to work the farms. It also ensures precise amounts of fertilizers are applied. Too much fertilizer causes the soil to release Earth-warming nitrogen gases.

Once crops are harvested, Van no longer burns the rice stubble — a major cause of air pollution in Vietnam and in its neighbors, as well as  Thailand  and  India . Instead, it’s collected by the Loc Troi Group for sale to other companies that use it as livestock feed and for growing straw mushrooms, a popular addition to stir-fries.

Van benefits in various ways. His costs are down while his farm yield is the same. Using organic fertilizer enables him to sell to European markets where customers are willing to pay a premium for organic rice. Best of all, he has time to tend to his own garden.

“I am growing jackfruit and coconut,” he said.

Loc Troi Group CEO Nguyen Duy Thuan said that those methods enable farmers to use 40% less rice seed and 30% less water. Costs for pesticides, fertilizer and labor also are lower. Thuan said Loc Troi — which exports to more than 40 countries including in Europe, Africa, the United States and Japan — is working with farmers to expand acreage using its methods from the current 100 hectares to 300,000 hectares.

That’s a long way from Vietnam’s own target of growing “high quality, low emission rice” on 1 million hectares of farmland, an area more than six times the size of London, by 2030. Vietnamese officials estimate that would reduce production costs by a fifth and increase farmers’ profits by more than $600 million, according to the state media outlet Vietnam News.

Vietnam recognized early on that it had to reconfigure its rice sector. It was the largest rice exporter, ahead of both India and Thailand, to sign  a 2021 pledge to reduce methane emissions  at the annual United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

Each year, the industry suffers losses of over $400 million, according to  recent research by Vietnam’s Water Resources Science Institute . This is worrying, not just for the country but for the world.

The Mekong Delta, where 90% of Vietnam’s exported rice is farmed, is one of the world’s regions most vulnerable to climate change. A  U.N. climate change report  in 2022 warned of heavier flooding in the wet season and  droughts in the dry season . Scores of dams built upstream in China and Laos have reduced the river’s flow and the amount of sediment that it carries downriver to the sea. The sea level is rising and turning the river’s lower reaches salty. And unsustainable levels of groundwater pumping and sand mining for construction have added to the problems.

Changing centuries-old forms of rice farming is expensive, and even though methane is a more potent cause of global warming than carbon dioxide, it only receives 2% of climate financing, Ajay Banga, the World Bank’s president, told the  U.N. climate summit in Dubai  last year.

Combating methane emissions is the “one rare, clear area” where low-cost, effective and replicable solutions exist, Banga said. The World Bank is supporting Vietnam’s efforts and has begun helping the Indonesian government to expand climate resilient farming as a part of more than a dozen projects to reduce methane worldwide.

The hope is that more countries will follow, though there is no “one-size-fits-all,” said Lewis H. Ziska, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. “The one commonality is that water is needed,” he said, adding that different methods of planting and irrigation can help manage water better.

Growing more genetically diverse rice varieties would also help because some are more resilient to excess heat or require less water, while others might even emit less methane, he said.

Nguyen Van Nhut, director of the rice export company Hoang Minh Nhat, said its suppliers are using varieties of rice that can thrive even when the water is briny and the heat is extreme.

Now, the business is adapting to the unseasonal rains that make it harder to dry the rice, adding to risks from mold or insect damage. Typically, rice is dried in the sun immediately after harvest, but Nhut said his company has drying facilities in their packaging factory and also will install machinery to dry the grains closer to the fields.

“We don’t know which month is the rainy season, like we did before,” he said.

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Follow our news, recent searches, philippine court blocks gmo 'golden rice' production over safety fears, advertisement.

Farmers work in a rice field in Bulacan in the Philippines. (Photo: AFP/Jam Sta Rosa)

MANILA: A Philippine court has blocked the commercial propagation of genetically modified golden rice because it said conflicting scientific views gave rise to "severe" health and environmental safety concerns.

The Philippines was the first country in the world to approve golden rice, which is enriched with the Vitamin A precursor beta-carotene and has a bright yellow colour, in a bid to combat childhood blindness.

However, the Court of Appeals in Manila revoked a biosafety permit for commercial production of the rice granted by government regulators in 2021 after 14 opponents filed a challenge.

The court's ruling, issued on Apr 17 and seen by AFP on Thursday, also applies to a genetically modified eggplant, BT eggplant, that is pest resistant.

"By reason of the conflicting scientific views and uncertainties on the risks and effects of Golden Rice and Bt Eggplant, potential severe and grave threats to the welfare of people and the environment arise," the court said.

Commercial propagation was not allowed "until such time that the concerned respondent government agencies submit proof of safety and compliance with all legal requirements", it said.

Experts hope the rice will help combat childhood blindness and save lives in the developing world.

World Health Organization data show vitamin A deficiency causes up to 500,000 cases of childhood blindness every year, mostly in developing countries, with half of those dying within 12 months of losing their sight.

Golden rice was developed over two decades by the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Department of Agriculture-Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), while BT eggplant was developed by the University of the Philippines Los Banos campus.

The scientists involved insist both are safe to eat. PhilRice executive director John de Leon said in a statement the institute was "reviewing the implications" of the ruling to prepare its response.

The IRRI said it would continue to work with PhilRice on "developing safe and effective nutritional interventions through rice research".

It also said golden rice had received "positive food safety evaluations" from regulators in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.

However, the rice faced strong resistance from environmental groups opposed to genetically altered food plants and at least one test field in the Philippines was attacked by activists.

The opponents who filed the objection, including Greenpeace, welcomed the ruling.

"This decision is a monumental win for Filipino farmers and Filipino people who have for decades stood up against genetically modified crops," Greenpeace Southeast Asia campaigner Wilhelmina Pelegrina said in a statement.

"GM crops have never been proven safe, and have hindered necessary progress on climate resilient ecological agriculture that keeps the control of seeds on our farmers."

Ordinary rice, a staple for hundreds of millions of people, particularly in Asia, produces beta-carotene in the plant but it is not found in the grain.

Related Topics

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