Agriculture sector bullish of growing 2.5% this year

Agriculture is bullish that the sector will achieve growth in the six months to December, from a negative performance in the January-June semester, as government steps up its preparations for the wet cropping season. Former Agriculture Secretary Bernie Fondevilla said that the farm could grow by 0.5 percent to 2.5-percent. "We hope to keep earlier projections, but worse case is that there could be flat growth," Fondevilla told reporters on Wednesday. He said the government has kept its previous output target for rice at 17.4 million metric tons as an attainable goal, because of intervention measures that were in place before the wet cropping season started, including P3 billion to increase rice production. Romeo Recide, chief of the Agricultural Statistics Bureau, earlier said that farm output might grow in the second quarter but without mustering enough volumes for positive numbers. The sector in 21009 posted a negative 2.84 percent growth following a series of typhoons that damaged billions of pesos worth of farm output. Crops that accounted for almost half of the country’s agriculture production were down by 6.15 percent. —Nikka Corsino/VS, GMANews.TV