Same Land, Much More Rice

We grow more rice than we ever have. We still buy rice from other countries. Both of those are true, and for a long time I did not understand how.

The answer turned out to be one number, and it is not the one anybody quotes.

Same Land, Much More Rice

In 1961 we harvested 3.91 million tonnes of rice. In 2024 we harvested 19.09 million.

Now here is the part that surprised me. You would guess we cleared a lot more land. We did not.

Rice fields went from 3.18 million hectares to 4.65 million. That is only about half again as much land.

So the extra rice did not come from more fields. It came from each field giving more.

In 1961, one hectare gave 1,230 kilos. Now it gives 4,108. More than three times as much, off the same patch of ground.

That is a real win. Better seeds, better water, better fertiliser. Somebody worked hard for that.

The Number That Explains The Imports

But then I put us next to the neighbours, and it stopped feeling like a win.

One hectare in Vietnam gives 6,152 kilos. Ours gives 4,108.

Out of 8 Asian rice countries I looked at, we come 6th.

So that is the answer to the puzzle. We are not short of rice fields. We are short of rice per field. And we buy the difference from the very countries that get more out of the same ground.

There is not much spare land to fix it with either. There is only about 0.049 of a hectare of farmable land per Filipino. That is a small square each. So the only real lever is getting more from what is already planted.

One In Five People, Less Than One In Ten Pesos

Then I looked at farming as a job.

About 20.49 out of every 100 working Filipinos work in farming, fishing or forestry.

Those people produce 8.59 out of every 100 pesos the country makes.

One in five people. Under one in ten pesos. Split that out and each farm worker earns much less than everyone else.

Malaysia makes about the same slice of its money from farming as we do. It uses 9.18 out of every 100 workers to do it. We use more than twice as many people for the same share.

That is not a fact about lazy farmers. It is a fact about what one person with one hectare can do here compared to there. Which brings us back to the yield number again.

The Peso Number I Would Not Write

The old version of this page opened with a big peso figure for farm output.

I could not put that number back. Here is why.

The FAO tells you tonnes. Tonnes of rice, tonnes of coconut. It does not tell you pesos. To turn tonnes into pesos you need the price a farmer actually got, for each crop, for each year. I do not have that.

So I would have had to guess at a price and multiply. That is how the old number got there, I think. It looks solid. It is a guess wearing a suit.

There is no peso figure anywhere on the new page. It feels like less. It is more honest.

A Small Trap Worth Knowing

One thing nearly bit me while building this.

The FAO writes "tonnes" as a single letter: t. My tools read a column full of t and decided it meant "true". The whole column turned into yes-and-no answers instead of a unit.

Nothing broke loudly. Queries just stopped matching. So I spelled the word out in full when saving, and added a test that shouts if it ever turns back into a yes-or-no.

Small thing. But that is most of what this work is.