CEBU, Philippines - Team Pnoy candidates believed that using idle agricultural lands and providing green social enterprises are some of the ways to reduce the perennial problems of unemployment and underemployment in the country.
Edgardo “Sonny†Angara said that a public-private initiative to create one million jobs in the rural areas within a short term is as an urgent solution to the nagging underemployment problem that affects 7.9 million Filipino workers.
Angara, who visited Cebu the other day, said that the partnership would provide the funding, administrative support, technical support and trained staff to fully make productive at least one million hectares of underused or idle agricultural lands
Experts from the public and private sectors earlier said that at least a million hectares of agricultural lands is either lying idle or barely used for agricultural production and related commercial purposes. These idle and underutilized lands are spread out across the various regions.
Former Las Piñas Representative Cynthia Villar for her part said that the success of Villar’s green social enterprises that have provided livelihood to over 500 families in Las Piñas like water hyacinth basket weaving, coconet weaving, plastic pulverizing, organic composting, handloom blanket weaving and recently, citronella oil-making have been duplicated nationwide.
So far, pilot centers have been built in 111 towns all over the country.
“There are 1,600 municipalities and cities in the Philippines so we still have a lot of tasks ahead of us. I will continue promoting these livelihood programs because the benefits they provide to the people, especially the poor, are direct and fast. They do not need capital also because the raw materials are from wastes and our foundation provides the training and technology,†said Villar in an interview with The FREEMAN.
Villar, who was recently awarded as one of the “The Women Entrepreneur Icons and Filipina Entrepreneurs of 2013†by Go Negosyo said that her livelihood programs create jobs and help ease the unemployment problems in the country.
“I support entrepreneurship as the key to creating jobs. Even my livelihood programs are geared towards helping people gain the skills to start their own small businesses, even micro-enterprises can help boost our economy and provide livelihood or jobs to our countrymen. I will continue advocating those,†Villar added.
Angara, in a separate press statement said that the jobless and the underemployed would be the principal beneficiaries of the “One Million Hectares, One Million Jobs†program that he is proposing.
Of the roughly 7.9 million Filipinos who are underemployed, he said, 41 percent are in the rural areas.
According to Angara, the private sector can act as a steady and reliable market for what could be produced from the fully-utilized lands. He said that grow-out and contract growing partnerships between agribusiness integrators and farmers have not only created pockets of rural prosperity but also generated employment on a large scale.
The contract-growing partnerships cover many commercial crops, hog growing and broiler raising.
“The One Million Jobs, One Million Hectares Program is a viable poverty-alleviation and rural job generation program,†said Angara. — (FREEMAN)