Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan is once more highlighting the need to institutionalize reforms aimed at making farmers more credit-worthy, a move that is crucial in revitalizing the country’s agriculture sector and ensuring food security.
During the open forum at the Harvard Kennedy School alumni meeting on Friday, September 5, the senator lamented that while there is credit available, the problem lies on the credit-worthiness of the farmers or borrowers.
To do this, farmers have to organize themselves in cooperatives, he noted, lamenting that only 10% of the 26% of Filipino 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 explained.
Neighboring Thailand and Taiwan, the senator shared, have most of their farmers in cooperatives, allowing them to buy in bulk and purchase their own equipment and facility for post-harvest.
In the Philippines, the senator—who heads the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Food, and Agrarian Reform—believes that farmers need about three to five years of “hand-holding” interventions.
“The norm in the country is still subsistence farming. 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 pointed out.
As an example of an empowered farmers’ cooperative, he cited the case of the Kalasag Farmers Cooperative, which partnered with Jollibee Foundation to supply the country’s top fast food chain with onions and other crops.
Pangilinan explained that in a period of seven years, the cooperative was able to grow their deliveries by 10-fold—50 tons sold initially to Jollibee in 2008 that then increased to 500 tons in 2015.
“When the microfinance groups found out that Jollibee was buying onions from them… So, the microfinance group said, ‘that’s Jollibee.’ Then, they’re now credit-worthy,” the senator said. “Then, they’re willing to lend to them.”
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.
Pangilinan have filed two separate bills aimed at capacitating farmers: Senate Bill No. 1182, or the Agriculture and Fisheries Extension Act of 2025, to renationalize the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) extension services; and Senate Bill No. 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.