Agrarian Reform Has Failed. Where Should the Philippines Go From Here?

I'm the son and grandson of farmers, and I work in IT now. I studied economics in college. Since I was young, I've watched agriculture decline up close (we used to sell several cavans of our rice, but now even what we harvest doesn't last us a year). As I see it, the only solution is consolidating farmland through cooperatives. Farmers would become shareholders instead of individual micro-businesses that are easy to exploit. Any farming beyond subsistence level is a business. Money goes in, money comes out. Then farmers can keep doing what they do best while enjoying economies of scale, collective bargaining power, and maybe even direct government subsidies. They'd produce only as much as can be sold at a fair market price, take a bigger share of the final profit on the way from farm to market, and fill any supply shortfall with imports. Who benefits? Farmers, retailers, consumers. Who loses? Middlemen and importers. You can guess who has both the resources and the motive to block this. That's my opinion.

As a former military officer, I always say this: "We have a duty to defend the country, but we can't blame farmers for taking up arms and joining the communist armed struggle."

In one interview, the former CEO of Maharlika said Philippine agrarian reform failed partly because of culture too. The land of the first recipient keeps getting divided among their descendants, so economies of scale become impossible. A 1-hectare farm is already small compared to the collectivized farmland of cooperatives in neighboring countries, and when the farmers' children each split it further for their own share, it makes even less sense.

It may sound strange, but Vietnam is mostly 1-hectare smallholder farms (89% are family farms) and is a world-class exporter. With government support, millions of people banded together in huge regional blocs, keeping their bargaining power and getting cheaper inputs and higher selling prices. They were made to tear down their dikes, and were given support and shared storage, logistics, automated irrigation systems, and fertilizer drones. One of the top banks (Agribank) was instructed to give easy, cheap loans at ridiculously low interest so farmers could buy high-yield seeds and fertilizer. In 2024 they decided the smallholder model had hit its limit and reformed it, siding with smallholders and protecting land ownership while also allowing big companies to lease thousands of hectares for 50 years, bringing more centralized direction, advanced technology, and massive funding to the farms. So they made smallholders work and made the reforms work. So where did the Philippines go wrong?