SEN. Kiko Pangilinan raised the need to make farmers more credit-worthy to revitalize the country’s agriculture sector and ensure food security.

During the open forum at the Harvard Kennedy School alumni meeting on Friday, the senator lamented that while there is credit available, the problem lies on the credit-worthiness of the farmers or borrowers.

Sen. Pangilinan Advocates for Credit-Worthy Farmers to Boost Agriculture Sector

To do this, farmers have to organize themselves in cooperatives. He said only 10 percent of the farmers’ cooperatives are financially viable.

“So, we need to organize, strengthen our extension service, and get our farmers capacitated, so that they become credit-worthy, so that they get economies of scale, so that they can do bulk buying and the like,” Pangilinan said.

Thailand and Taiwan have most of their farmers in cooperatives, allowing them to buy in bulk and purchase their own equipment and facility for post-harvest, he said.

The senator believes that Filipino farmers need about three to five years of “hand-holding” interventions.

“The norm in the country is still subsistence farming,” said Pangilinan, chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Food, and Agrarian Reform.

“So, you need three to five years to bring them from subsistence farming into farm enterprise management. That’s what we need to do,” he said.

As an example of an empowered farmers’ cooperative, he cited the case of the Kalasag Farmers Cooperative, which partnered with a Jollibee Foundation to supply the country’s top fast-food chain with onions and other crops.

This access to credit enabled the Kalasag Farmers Cooperative to fund a cold storage facility in San Fernando, Pampanga, where they store their crops during post-harvest, reducing instances of post-harvest loss which is far too common in agricultural production.

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Pangilinan filed two separate bills aimed at capacitating farmers — Senate Bill (SB) 1182, or the Agriculture and Fisheries Extension Act of 2025, to renationalize the Department of Agriculture’s extension services and SB 1183 or the Act Ensuring the Development, Promotion, and Protection of Agricultural Cooperatives, which will create the Bureau of Agricultural Cooperatives to provide funding and boost the productivity of cooperatives.