Agriculture is a crucial sector for reducing poverty and attaining the Millenuim Development Goals (MDG’s), which includes halving the proportion of people in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 (from its leve in 1990). While the economy is growing, there may be a need to examine the agriculture sector more carefully, since official poverty statistics (dating as far back as 1985 up to the most recently released figures in 2009) show that the concentration of the poor has been in the entire agriculture sector. Many resources have been devoted by past administrations to agricultural modernization, the provision of agricultural inputs, and agrarian reform, but the Philippines continues to face a lot of challenges particularly to uplift the farmers out of poverty. How important is agriculture in the economy?
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