How rice growing in the Phl went wrong

Alex Quinones has been a rice farmer in the Philippines for almost five decades - last summer was the first time his field dried up, forcing many of his neighbors to swap farm life for street sweeping.

"We were not able to harvest any rice. This drought was unlike anything we experienced before," Quinones, 62, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation from his farm in Oriental Mindoro.

Farm groups blame a dangerous cocktail of high imports, low trade prices and an ill-planned subsidy scheme for crippling the rice sector, pushing many small growers out of business.

Quinones leads an association of about 300 local rice farmers and said some had now become builders, street sweepers and waste pickers just so they could eat or pay off debts.

Along with fast-changing weather patterns, he said a deluge of foreign rice imports have risen by nearly 60 percent since 2020 has also hit income in recent years, with traders buying local rice near production costs.

The government said the El Niño phenomenon had cost the farm sector P9.5 billion ($161.70 million) in damage as of May, as climate change slashed rice production.

Although one in four Filipinos work in farming, the country has now become the world's top importer of rice, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.