The Practicability Of The Usage Of Hybrid Rice Varieties Produced By The International Rice Research Institute In The Cases Of Filipino Farmers In Camiling, Tarlac

Abstract

Philippines is said to dwell on being an agriculture-based country because of its societal status, natural resources available and technological innovation stagnation. But being agriculture based country; it made people very much involved into agriculture. This is a fact that make most of Filipinos work as farmers, and this is their means of producing staple foods needed by every Filipino mouth to survive, and most common of these staple foods is rice. The Philippine government visualizes agriculture modernization of rice farming through collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute, and International and non-profit organization that uses modem means of altering the genes of local rice varieties into hybrid rice varieties in order to make high-yielding rice varieties to help Filipino farmers increase their productivity. As a challenge to this claim and as an answer from the farmers’ perspective of how the government is helping them, this study provided evidences of impracticability of the usage of hybrid rice varieties because of its being capital intensive and the farmers’ perspective that the government is not helping them with this kind of agricultural modernization because it should focus first on solving the institutional, financial and structural problems of the individual farmers.