Extreme weather 2 December 2025
TheMonitorMindanaoToday.com | Bad weather stunts agri sector’s growth
By: Uriel Quilinguing
CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY, Philippines – Although the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that the economy of Northern Mindanao (Region 10) grew by six-percent in 2024, this growth rate could have been higher were it not of the P10-billion damage to the agricultural sector due to the 10-month long El Nińo episode.
Region 10’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) breached the trillion-peso mark of P1,043,493,796 last year, but its Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishery (AFF) Sector grew only by 0.05 percent, missing the 2.5 – 4.5 target, despite contributing 17.9 percent to the GDP. The performance of the Industry Sector went up 7.5 percent while Services Sector grew by 7.4 percent.
These were among the vital economic indicators that the Department of Economy, Planning, and Development (DepDev) Region 10 presented in a communicators’ forum on Tuesday, November 25, 2025, at the N Hotel, to highlight challenges in the Northern Mindanao Regional Development Plan (RDP) 2023-2028.
DepDev 10 Regional Director Mylah Faye Carińo said that Northern Mindanao has long envisioned itself to emerge as the country’s leading agricultural hub by 2040 from its current predominantly service sector-based economy. But the region’s AFF sector, which has a potential production value of P187-billion, has been lagging behind annual growth targets in recent years.
In 2024, the Region 10 ranked second in the country’s AFF sector, contributing 10.5 percent mainly from crop production to the national output – behind Region 3 or Central Luzon’s 13.7 percent from its poultry and fishery industries.
NATURAL HAZARDS
“We knew it (AFF sector) would be vulnerable to climate-related hazards,” Carińo said, describing Northern Mindanao’s ecological integrity and building resilient communities amid threats of extreme weather conditions as “cross-cutting concern” imbedded in the 21 chapters of the RDP.
The AFF sector, she said, was the most resilient among three sectors in the region during the Covid pandemic in 2020 when it managed to grow at 1.5 percent, although it was not enough to compensate the contractions in industry and services sectors. The region’s economy was negative 5.3 percent then.
And just when Northern Mindanao’s economy crawled back to pre-pandemic levels, posting 6.3 percent and 7.2 percent GDP growth rates in 2021 and 2022, respectively, a La Nińa (shear line) episode struck in late 2022 and followed by El Nińo’s dry spells in the succeeding months that ended in June 2024.
Carińo said most of the region’s 353 villages in “convergence areas for peace and development” were worst hit by extreme weather conditions, places which planners classified as poverty-stricken, conflict-sensitive, and geographically-isolated. She said while Northern Mindanao is growing, yet “there’s a wide differential” requiring targeted interventions.
INITIATIVES
Last week, the Department of Agriculture and the provincial government of Bukidnon inked a memorandum of agreement on November 26, 2025 for the establishment of a P1.97-billion Bukidnon Food Hub in Barangay Diclum in Manolo Fortich town – about 35 kilometers from here.
The facility is intended to increase agricultural productivity, provide farmers’ support particularly on high-value crop production, link with processors and access to domestic and international market.
Incidentally, the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) ended its two-day regional conference on Farm and Fisheries Clustering and Consolidation (F2C2) also on November 26, with emphasis on aquaculture diversification – all geared towards building resiliency among farming and fishing communities. (Uriel Quilinguing)
###
