How Much Has People Empowerment Progressed among Small Farmers and Fisherfolk? State of People’s Organizations in the Philippines

Abstract

This is an attempt to quantify government’s performance in empowering small farmers and fishers following the provisions of AFMA. It establishes four dimensions of empowerment that may be used to measure empowerment and presents some evidence of how government has performed under each of these dimensions. It concludes that government has been on track in following AFMA’s prescriptions for SFF empowerment but that its efforts are coming too little, too late although there are strong indications that such effort can be upscaled and can still achieve the empowerment objectives of AFMA if the government can undertake certain short-term and long-term policy measures.