The Department of Agriculture (DA) lowered its growth projection for the farm sector to 2 percent from an earlier target of 2.5 percent due to the continuing effects of the pandemic and the African swine fever (ASF).
“We always would like to be optimistic but the big challenges are still there — lockdown and ASF. I can still see the 2.5- percent (growth). We hope to achieve a comfortable growth in sync with population growth, 2 percent would be a good target,” said DA Secretary William Dar, in an online briefing yesterday.
“There are still no indications of COVID-19 (new coronavirus diseases 2019) slowing down,” Dar said.
But he said other subsectors are growing, like palay, which posted a record harvest last year.
For this year, the DA sees palay production hitting yet another record of 20.4 million metric tons (MT) of palay, surpassing 2020’s19.44 million MT.
Last year, agriculture output contracted 1.2 percent from 2019’s 0.7 percent growth due to the combined effects of the Taal volcano eruption, typhoons, the pandemic and ASF.
Corn production last year grew by 1.75 percent to 8.12 million MT from 7.98 million MT while hog output dipped by 7 percent to 2.14 million MT from 2.3 million MT.
