Philippine Agriculture, 1961–2024
Sixty-four years of FAOSTAT harvests for 16 crops, next to what agriculture is worth and who works in it. Rice output is up 4.9×. Planted area is up 1.46×. Almost all of the difference is yield — and yield is where the country still trails the region.
Agriculture employs 20.488% of Filipino workers and produces 8.592% of output. That ratio — 2.4 to one — is the whole story, and it has a specific cause.
- Rice production rose 4.9× since 1961, from 3.91M to 19.09M tonnes. Planted area rose only from 3.18M to 4.65M hectares. The harvest grew because each hectare grew, not because more land was cleared.
- Yield went from 1230 to 4108 kg per hectare — real, hard-won progress. It still leaves the Philippines 6 of 8 Asian producers.
- Vietnam gets 6152 kg from the same hectare — 33% more. Closing that gap on existing rice land would add more grain than any realistic expansion of area.
- Agriculture's share of GDP has fallen from 23.645% in 1961 to 8.592%. Its share of jobs has not fallen nearly as fast, which is what a productivity gap looks like from the inside.
What The Country Grows
The five largest harvests by tonnage, 1961 to 2024. FAO's own aggregate rows — "Cereals, primary", "Fruit Primary" — are excluded, because they contain the individual crops and summing both roughly doubles the harvest while still looking plausible.
Rice
The staple, and the crop the rest of this page is about.
Sugar cane
Second by raw tonnage, though cane is mostly water — tonnage flatters it against grain.
Coconuts
In shell. The Philippines is among the largest producers in the world, and coconut is the export crop most exposed to a single global price.
Rice: More From The Same Ground
Three series that are usually shown separately and mean much more together. Production is up nearly five-fold. Area is barely up. The gap between those two lines is yield, and yield is a choice about seed, water and fertiliser rather than about geography.
Production
3.91M to 19.09M tonnes.
Area harvested
3.18M to 4.65M hectares. Land is not what changed.
Yield
1230 to 4108 kg per hectare. This line is doing nearly all the work.
The Gap That Explains The Imports
The Philippines imports rice while growing more of it than ever. The reason is visible the moment yields are put side by side: the same hectare produces substantially less here than in the countries the rice is bought from.
Philippines
6 of 8 Asian producers in this comparison.
Vietnam
The country the Philippines buys most of its imported rice from.
The shortfall
Matching Vietnam on existing rice land would add several million tonnes — more than any plausible expansion of planted area could.
A Shrinking Share, A Slower-Shrinking Workforce
Every developing economy sees agriculture's share of output fall. What matters is whether the share of workers falls with it. Here it has not kept pace, and the space between the two lines is a gap in income per worker.
Share of GDP
Down from 23.645% in 1961.
Share of jobs
About one worker in five.
Ratio
Employment share over output share. At 1.0 farm work would pay like other work. It does not, and this number is the size of that.
Against The Neighbours
Five ASEAN economies at 2025. The comparison worth making is not who farms most, but how far each country's farm employment sits above its farm output.
Malaysia
Of employment. The lowest in the group, on a similar share of GDP to the Philippines — the same output from half the workforce.
Vietnam
A larger farm workforce than the Philippines, and a larger farm economy to go with it.
Arable land per person
Hectares of arable land per Filipino. Land is genuinely scarce here, which is the argument for yield rather than area.
Livestock
Animal stocks, from the same FAOSTAT domain. Units differ between animals — some are counted in head and some in thousands of head — so the chart plots each on its own scale rather than pretending they share one.
Chickens
Head, 2024. FAO reports this one in 1000 An.
Ducks
Head, 2024. FAO reports this one in 1000 An.
Why no meat tonnage
FAO carries meat production too, but its "Meat, Total" row is an aggregate of the individual meats. Charting both would double-count, so this section stays with live animal stocks.
What This Page Does Not Cover
The version this replaces charted agricultural output in pesos, production by region, fishery volumes, farm size distribution, irrigation coverage, seasonal cropping patterns, a rice self-sufficiency ratio and climate impact. None are derivable from FAOSTAT or the World Bank, and none had a source.
Anything in pesos
FAO publishes tonnage, not value. Turning one into the other needs farmgate prices per crop per year, which this repository does not have — so no peso figure appears on this page at all, including the headline the old version led with.
Regional, farm size, irrigation
These come from PSA's Census of Agriculture and Fisheries and its regional accounts. PSA sits behind a managed challenge that scripts do not pass.
Self-sufficiency and fisheries
A self-sufficiency ratio needs production and imports on the same commodity basis — FAO's Food Balance Sheets carry it, in a separate domain not ingested here. Fisheries likewise sit in FAO's FishStat rather than in this download.
Method
Two fetchers, eight CSVs, both sources open and keyless.
FAOSTAT
The Production_Crops_Livestock domain, Asia regional bulk — about 4 MB against 32 MB for the world, and it contains everything used here including the neighbours' rice yields. 16 crops and six livestock types, 64 years.
Aggregates are excluded by name
FAO mixes individual crops with its own aggregates in the same
column: "Rice" and "Cereals, primary" are both rows, and the
second contains the first. Every crop here is named explicitly and
checks.sql rejects any item matching "primary" or
"Total", because summing them doubles the harvest and the total
still looks reasonable.
A unit that reads as a boolean
FAO writes tonnes as a bare t. A CSV column whose
only value is t is inferred as BOOLEAN by DuckDB and
most other readers, so unit = 'tonnes' matches
nothing and trim(unit) raises outright. The fetcher
spells it out, and a check asserts it stayed spelled out.
Missing years stay missing
The bulk file is wide, one column per year, and a year with no survey is an empty cell. Unpivoting turns those into absent rows rather than zero-tonne harvests, so a gap draws as a gap.
Renamed items are caught
FAO renames crops between releases — "Garlic" is "Green garlic" here, and the original matched nothing. A coverage CSV records every requested item and whether it resolved, and a check fails on any that did not, because a vanished crop otherwise just disappears from a chart.
Verification
Twelve assertions in checks.sql, including one
that reconciles production against area × yield to within
2% — FAO derives the three separately, so they should agree
and drifting apart means one was revised alone.
Key Findings & Summary
- Rice output rose 4.9× since 1961 while planted area rose only 1.46×, from 3.18M to 4.65M hectares. Yield did the work, tripling from 1230 to 4108 kg per hectare.
- That still leaves the Philippines 6 of 8 Asian producers, 33% behind Vietnam's 6152 kg per hectare. The country imports rice from places that get more out of the same hectare.
- Land is not the lever. Arable land runs to 0.049 hectares per person, so the realistic gain is per-hectare rather than more hectares.
- Agriculture fell from 23.645% of GDP in 1961 to 8.592%, while still employing 20.488% of workers — a ratio of 2.4 to one. Malaysia produces a similar share of its GDP from farming with 9.18% of its workforce.
- No figure on this page is in pesos. Converting FAO tonnage to value needs farmgate prices this repository does not hold, and the version this replaces led with exactly that invented conversion.
Sources & Citations
Every figure on this page traces to one of these, through a CSV in
data/ph-agriculture/. Each is checked against its source query on every
build.
FAOSTAT Production: Crops and LivestockSecondary
Production, area harvested and yield for 16 crops and 6 livestock types, 1961-2024 — Asia regional bulk download; FAO compiles national reporting
World Bank World Development IndicatorsSecondary
Agriculture value added and employment share, arable land, fertiliser use
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