GUIDING POLICIES TO PROMOTE AGRICULTURAL GROWTH, FOOD SECURITY, AND ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE PHILIPPINES

Outcome Overview

A 2014 United Nations report ranked The Philippines as the second most at-risk country in the world. A key risk factor for the country is climate change. If nothing is done to mitigate its impacts or adapt to it, climate change is projected to put an additional 2 million people at risk of hunger by 2050, and negatively impact the country’s economy.

As the Philippines’ premier socioeconomic planning body, the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) provides high-level advice to policymakers in Congress and in the Executive Branch. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), with support from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), partnered with NEDA to examine the impact of climate change on food production, food prices, and food security, and assess the effectiveness of alternative adaptation strategies. Research activities included data collection, development of modeling tools, and innovative climate and socioeconomic scenario analysis.

The findings were presented at a high-level policy forum on the future of the Philippine agriculture, held in Manila in September 2015 (see examples of press coverage here, here, and here). A key recommendation of the study was to increase investment in agricultural research and other productivity-enhancing measures. In 2016, the CGIAR-wide Global Futures and Strategic Foresight initiative organized trainings to familiarize technical experts from the national governments with the modeling methodology and interpretation of results.

At the Global Landscape Forum in November 2016, NEDA Assistant Secretary M.A. Sombilla described how the outputs of the research guided the Philippine Development Plan 2017-2022 as well as the process of allocating funds to the various government agencies by the Department of Budget and Management.

The findings were collected in the book “The future of Philippine agriculture under a changing climate: Policies, investments and scenarios” (Rosegrant and Sombilla, eds.) launched by IFPRI and NEDA in December 2018.

At the book launch event, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto M. Pernia noted that

“The policy recommendations in this book are timely. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming warns that a host of climate-related risks—from sea level rise to food and water supplies, security and health issues—will be worse if global temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius. Climate change is only about to get worse with recent rapid increases in temperature. If we do nothing, this will impede our target of increasing agricultural productivity and ensuring food security.”

The outputs of this collaboration also promoted other reforms, including in the rice sector, which was identified as particularly vulnerable to climate change. Analyses showing that the removal of rice subsidies and the replacement of quantitative restrictions on rice imports with tariffs would boost economic growth contributed to the government’s decision on the new rice tariffication reform, which was passed by the House and Senate in 2018 and became law in 2019.

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This work was undertaken as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) under Flagship 1: Technological Innovation and Sustainable Intensification.

This story is part of the PIM 2018 Outcomes collection. For more information about our work in 2018, see PIM Achievements in 2018: Highlights and Annual report 2018: CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM).