Happy not bitter A farmer tends an ampalaya vine. AFP “Economic growth would be nothing if it doesn’t reach our farmers and fisherfolk.”

Senator Sonny Angara said yesterday he wants to complement the Duterte administration’s “Build, Build, Build” program with a “Plant, Plant, Plant” campaign.

Angara said he wants to kick-start an agricultural revolution for a more inclusive economic growth and revival of the country’s ailing agriculture sector.

Speaking at the 2018 National Conference and Agri-Fishery Research and Development Festival held in Sorsogon City, Angara stressed government should invest heavily in the agriculture sector if it wants economic growth to be felt across the nation.

“Just as we hope to enter a golden age of infrastructure, we should aim to reach an equivalent ‘golden age of agriculture.’ Where there’s build, build, build, there should also be a ‘grow, grow, grow’; ‘plant, plant, plant’ or even ‘fish, fish, fish,’” Angara said.

“We may be exhibiting the fastest growth rates in the world today, but such growth would be nothing if it doesn’t reach our farmers and fisherfolk,” he added.

Angara cited data that 60 percent of poor Filipinos work in the agriculture sector.

The conference was hosted by the Fulbright-Philippine Agriculture Alumni Association Inc.

The senator’s father, the late Senate President Edgardo Angara, is considered the father of the Fulbright-Philippine Agriculture Program.

Angara recently received the Posthumous Award given by the Department of Agriculture to his late father “for his distinguished contribution in the modernization of the Philippine agriculture and fisheries through the realization of the Agriculture and Fishery Modernization Act (AFMA) while he served as Agriculture Secretary from 1999 to 2001.”

The award stated that during his term as Agriculture Secretary, food production industries recorded a growth rate of 3.6 percent, which instituted countryside development and progress, increase in the income of farmers and fishers, and the upliftment of lives and livelihood in the rural areas.

Angara said that becoming an agriculture secretary gave his father the opportunity to implement the AFMA law and to champion the advancement of food production programs that brought about the increase in volume of rice yield and other food staples in the country.

“To him, investments in agriculture R&D were always the most cost-effective. My father may have been a ‘weekend farmer’-as he once put it. But the problems facing farmers, fisher folk, livestock producers and all others in agriculture always occupied his mind,” the senator said of his father.