Sustaining Food Security in the Philippines: A Time Series Analysis

With the complexities of life that modernization has offered to humans, many forgot that basic needs comes from the environment. This research proved that Philippines as a predominantly agricultural country must focused on its strength in sustaining the country’s food needs. Factors that sustain food security condition of the country was identified guided by the economic model by Smith and Haddad that specified that in an agrarian economy food security will be achieved through increasing food productivity. Secondary data were used in the study covering 23 years from 1990 to 2013 and were estimated using the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression. Empirical findings show that the share of agricultural budget to the total General Appropriations Act has significant positive effect on the food security index increasing by 3.72. The study concluded that food security will be sustainable if the population depending on agriculture, fishery, hunting and forestry will be decreased.？ This suggests that experts on agriculture must intervene on the micro level dealing on the production decisions made by farmers and fishermen as this has an impact on the food security condition of the country.