When President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivers his fifth State of the Nation Address (SoNA) on Monday, he will have shrinking room for promises as different sectors are demanding results.

With less than two years left in his six-year term, his administration is no longer being judged primarily by its plans or policy announcements, but by whether those have translated into measurable improvements in the lives of Filipinos.

Marcos is expected to tout economic growth, infrastructure investments, education reforms, and the efforts to stabilize food prices.

Yet, in the days leading up to the SoNA, business groups, labor unions, farmers, teachers and economists have converged on a single message: the administration must move beyond governance reforms and demonstrate that its policies are delivering tangible results.

Business leaders say the administration must now complement its governance reforms with a clearer economic roadmap.

In a recent statement, the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) urged Marcos to use his fifth SoNA to outline “a clear and concrete economic agenda” alongside his efforts to improve transparency and curb corruption.

MAP president Donald Lim said reforms to restore accountability and public trust remain necessary, but argued that they should be matched by measures that directly strengthen the economy.

“Beyond these reforms, what we want to hear is a clear economic agenda that creates jobs, attracts investments, improves food security, lowers the cost of doing business, and restores confidence,” Lim said.

“The country is tired of politics. We must fight corruption decisively, but we should not let the fight against corruption become a brake on economic growth. It is time to bring the conversation back to creating jobs, attracting investments, strengthening local industries, improving public services, and improving the daily lives of our people,” Lim stressed.

The business group’s position comes as the administration continues to deal with the fallout from its campaign against irregularities in flood control projects, the centerpiece of Marcos’s 2025 SoNA that led to investigations across several agencies.

While the crackdown was welcomed as an effort to strengthen accountability, business leaders warned that tighter oversight should not unnecessarily delay legitimate infrastructure projects and public spending.

Labor organizations, meanwhile, argue that economic gains have yet to translate into higher purchasing power.

The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) renewed its call for a legislated wage increase, saying workers continue to struggle with rising living costs despite the administration’s economic accomplishments.

“It is already PBBM’s fifth SoNA, but the true condition of the nation remains like this — the minimum wage earners still have no P200 additional wage toward a living wage,” TUCP said in a statement.

SoNA must provide bridge

Senator Loren Legarda said the fifth SoNA must propose ways to bridge the gap between economic growth and actual Filipino lives.

Legarda said the Filipino people deserve an honest account of where the country stands after years marked by economic uncertainty, rising prices, corruption controversies, climate disasters, threats to national security, and widening anxiety over the future.

The President must speak directly to families who have endured one crisis after another, often without enough savings, stable income, and reliable public services to absorb the next shock.

“It seems like the country emerged from the pandemic only to face continuing food inflation, geopolitical conflicts, volatile fuel prices, supply disruptions, destructive typhoons, and renewed uncertainty in the global economy,” Legarda said.

“For years, it has been the Filipino family that has repeatedly had to adjust. They cut back on food, skimped on medicine, delayed bills, and looked for additional work. As prices rose, they were the first to be hurt, and also the last to feel any recovery,” the veteran legislator said.

Rocketing prices

The ongoing Middle East crisis has led to rocketing commodity prices.

As of June 2026, headline inflation remained at 6.4 percent, well above the government’s 2 percent to 4 percent target. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas has raised interest rates amid persistent price pressures and it projects full-year inflation at 6.4 percent, citing the effects of a prolonged global supply shock and elevated oil prices.

The Federation of Free Farmers (FFF), the country’s oldest national farmers’ organization, gave the Marcos administration a rating ranging from “barely passing” to “fail” for its performance in agriculture and fisheries since 2022.

The group said that despite successive increases in the Department of Agriculture’s budget, farm and fisheries output has largely stagnated while the country has become increasingly dependent on imported food.

The FFF noted that while roughly 60 percent of the Department of Agriculture’s budget is devoted to rice, average yield increased only slightly from 4.11 metric tons per hectare in 2022 to 4.14 metric tons in 2025, remaining below the government’s five-ton target.

The organization also said the Philippines now imports about 30 percent of its rice requirement, compared with less than 10 percent a decade ago.

“For three million rice farmers, their incomes declined by an estimated P50 billion per year in real terms since the enactment of the Rice Tariffication Law in 2019,” it said.

Agriculture experts argued that the problem extends beyond production.

Dr. Teodoro Mendoza of the Integrated Rural Development Foundation warned that farming is becoming less attractive to younger Filipinos.

“Farmers’ children are leaving the farm, while farmers are aging. Who will farm for us consumers?” Mendoza said, reiterating his proposal for a minimum farmgate price for palay to provide farmers with what he described as a just and fair income.

Demands, demands

Business groups are calling for a clearer economic agenda, labor organizations are demanding higher wages, farmers want stronger protection for domestic agriculture, teachers are pressing for improvements inside classrooms, and economists are urging structural reforms.

Taken together, these demands suggest that Marcos’s fifth SoNA will be judged less by the number of programs his administration will announce than by how convincingly it will explain why persistent problems remain despite four years of reforms.

Business leaders demand faster projects implementation without sacrifice ng accountability.