We cannot film our way out of agricultural poverty

There is something appealing about the idea of encouraging young people to become farmers through film. A short film can make the invisible visible. It can tell the story of a farmer whose name rarely appears in newspapers, whose labor is often reduced to statistics, and whose hands produce the food that eventually reaches our tables. It can make agriculture emotional, human, dramatic, and even aspirational. This is one of the promises of PelikulAgraryo 2026, whose theme, “Tinig ng Lupang Malaya: Kwento at Aral-Agraryo, Butil na Pamana sa Kabataan” (Voices of the Liberated Land: Agrarian Stories and Lessons, Seeds of Legacy for the Youth), invites students to tell stories about farmers through cinema.

During the regional awarding ceremony at the West Visayas State University Cultural Center, DAR Assistant Secretary Jenil Demorito emphasized the importance of encouraging students to become farmers through their knowledge and creativity in producing short films about the lives of farmers. It is a meaningful proposition, and I believe film has a role to play. But we need to ask a more uncomfortable question. Can a short film really persuade a young person to become a farmer when the actual life of a farmer remains economically difficult, socially undervalued, and structurally insecure?

This is where the conversation becomes more complicated. Film can inspire, but inspiration has limits. A beautifully produced short film can make the farm look beautiful for fifteen minutes, but it cannot automatically make farming profitable for the next fifteen years. It can show the dignity of planting, harvesting, and caring for the land, but it cannot by itself solve the problem of low farm income. It can portray the farmer as a hero, but it cannot pay the farmer like one. It can make a young person admire agriculture, but admiration is different from choosing agriculture as a profession. This distinction is important because there is a danger in cultural campaigns that celebrate the farmer without sufficiently confronting the conditions that make farming difficult. We sometimes romanticize the farmer precisely because we have failed to build a society in which farmers can live with security, dignity, and economic stability.

I do not think this means we should dismiss PelikulAgraryo or similar initiatives. On the contrary, we should take them more seriously. If film is going to be used as a cultural instrument to encourage young people to consider agriculture, then it should not merely tell young people that farming is noble. It should show them why farming can be a viable future. There is a significant difference between saying, “Become a farmer because farmers feed the nation,” and saying, “Here is a farming system in which you can own or securely access land, earn a decent income, use technology, receive institutional support, build a business, access markets, and live a dignified life.” The first is a moral appeal. The second is a social proposition. Young people deserve the second.

The question of youth participation in agriculture therefore cannot be separated from the larger question of how society treats farmers. We cannot ask young people to enter an occupation that their parents spent decades trying to escape. We cannot tell a young graduate that agriculture is the future while presenting farming as a life of debt, uncertainty, expensive inputs, unpredictable weather, unstable prices, inadequate infrastructure, and limited access to capital. We cannot tell young people that they should return to the land while the land itself remains inaccessible to many of them. If farming is continually presented as an occupation for those who have no other choice, it should not surprise us when young people choose something else.

This is why the problem is not simply a lack of appreciation for agriculture. It is a problem of structure, education, economics, land, culture, technology, and public policy. The short film can open the conversation, but the conversation has to continue beyond the screen.

First, agriculture needs to be brought more seriously into the curriculum. We should not wait for students to encounter farming through a competition, a field trip, or an occasional school project. Agriculture should become part of how young people understand society itself. Students need to understand where food comes from, who produces it, how agricultural economies work, why farmers remain vulnerable, how climate change affects food production, how technology is transforming agriculture, and what opportunities exist in modern farming. Agricultural education should not be limited to teaching students how to plant vegetables. It should include agricultural entrepreneurship, agribusiness, food systems, agricultural technology, cooperative development, marketing, environmental sustainability, land policy, and rural development.

If we want young people to see agriculture as a profession, then we need to stop presenting it as an outdated occupation. The farmer of the future should not be imagined only as someone holding a bolo in a field. The farmer can also be a technologist, entrepreneur, researcher, agronomist, drone operator, data analyst, seed producer, food processor, cooperative manager, content creator, or agricultural business owner. Young people are attracted to possibility. We need to show them that agriculture contains possibilities beyond subsistence.

Second, farming must be properly valued and funded. It is difficult to convince young people that agriculture is a viable career when the people who are already doing it continue to struggle. Public money must follow public priorities. If food security is genuinely a national priority, then agriculture cannot be treated as a secondary concern that receives attention only when there is a crisis. Farmers need access to affordable credit, quality seeds and inputs, irrigation, machinery, post-harvest facilities, storage, transportation, insurance, technical assistance, digital tools, and reliable markets. Government programs must be designed not merely to distribute assistance but to create sustainable agricultural systems.

The measure of an agricultural program should not simply be how many seminars were conducted, how many seedlings were distributed, how many beneficiaries were photographed, or how many certificates were awarded. We should ask a harder set of questions. Did farm income increase? Did production become more efficient? Did farmers gain better access to markets? Did post-harvest losses decrease? Did young people actually enter agriculture? Did they stay? Did their quality of life improve? Did farming become more profitable and more secure?

Third, we have to improve the quality of life of farmers. This may sound obvious, but it is often missing from conversations about encouraging young people to farm. Young people are not simply choosing careers. They are choosing lives. They are thinking about housing, health care, education, transportation, connectivity, leisure, family, social mobility, and the possibility of building a future. If rural communities remain underserved while cities offer better access to services and opportunities, young people will continue to leave.

We need to make rural life desirable, not merely tolerable. This means investing in rural schools, health care, roads, internet connectivity, electricity, public transportation, community spaces, cultural programs, and local economies. A young farmer should be able to imagine a fulfilling life in a rural community without feeling that entering agriculture means surrendering the opportunities associated with modern life.

Fourth, young people need access to land and adequate capital. It is almost absurd to tell someone to become a farmer without asking where that person will farm. Farming requires land, and land remains one of the most fundamental barriers to entering agriculture. A young person may have the knowledge, energy, and desire to farm, but without secure access to land, those qualities are insufficient. Land reform, land access programs, agricultural leases, community farming, cooperatives, and other mechanisms for enabling young farmers to enter the sector need serious attention.

Capital is equally important. A young person may want to establish a farm but have no money to buy equipment, seeds, livestock, irrigation systems, technology, or even transportation. If young people are expected to enter agriculture through personal savings alone, we are effectively limiting farming to those who already possess economic resources. Agricultural financing should therefore recognize young farmers as potential entrepreneurs rather than simply as beneficiaries.

Fifth, we need to change the cultural image of the farmer. This is where film, literature, journalism, television, social media, and other forms of cultural production become important. We need more stories about farmers, but we need better stories. The farmer should not always appear as the poor victim, the noble old man, the suffering mother, or the symbolic figure standing in a field at sunset. These stories can be powerful, but if that becomes the dominant image of agriculture, we unintentionally reinforce the idea that farming is synonymous with poverty and sacrifice.

We need stories about farmers who innovate, organize, earn, experiment, fail, recover, build businesses, use technology, engage with markets, and transform their communities. We need stories about young farmers who choose agriculture not because they had no other option but because they saw an opportunity. We need stories about women farmers, Indigenous farmers, agricultural scientists, cooperatives, food entrepreneurs, farm communities, and rural innovators. We need to expand the cultural imagination of what a farmer can be.

This is where PelikulAgraryo can become more than a competition. It can become a space for cultural intervention. Student filmmakers can be encouraged not only to document the suffering of farmers but also to investigate the systems surrounding that suffering. Who owns the land? Who controls the market? Who determines prices? Where does the farmer’s income go? What happens between the farm and the consumer? Why do farm products sometimes become expensive in urban markets while farmers remain poorly compensated? What happens when climate change destroys a harvest? What does mechanization mean for rural employment? What happens to agricultural communities when young people leave?

These are cinematic questions because they are human questions. They contain conflict, history, inequality, aspiration, loss, hope, and transformation. A short film about agriculture does not need to be propaganda. It can be a form of inquiry. It can ask why the farmer remains poor in a country that constantly celebrates the importance of food security. It can ask why the people who feed the nation often struggle to feed their own families. It can ask why young people are being encouraged to return to the land while the economic structures surrounding agriculture remain deeply unequal.

And this brings us to the central problem. If we want young people to become farmers, we must first make farming a profession that young people can reasonably choose. We should not guilt them into it. We should not tell them that abandoning the farm is abandoning the nation. We should not romanticize hardship and call it resilience. We should not turn poverty into a cultural virtue and expect the next generation to inherit it.

Young people are not rejecting agriculture simply because they are disconnected from nature or because they are obsessed with urban careers. Many are making rational decisions based on what they see around them. They see farmers struggling with debt. They see uncertainty in agricultural prices. They see the effects of typhoons, droughts, floods, pests, and climate change. They see parents and grandparents working for years without accumulating enough wealth. They see limited opportunities in rural communities. They see that education is often promoted as the pathway out of farming. Then we turn around and ask them to come back.

That contradiction deserves attention.

For as long as farmers remain poor, it will be difficult to convince young people that farming is a desirable profession. This is not because young people are selfish. It is because they want a future. They want decent wages, security, independence, technology, mobility, and dignity. They want to know that the work they choose will allow them to build a life. If farming cannot offer these things, no amount of motivational messaging will permanently solve the problem.

This is why the short film is both powerful and insufficient. It can plant a seed in the imagination, but imagination needs an environment in which it can grow. We cannot make young people fall in love with agriculture while allowing agriculture itself to remain economically unattractive. We cannot produce beautiful stories about the land while neglecting the people who work it. We cannot celebrate the farmer on stage while leaving the farmer vulnerable after the applause ends.

PelikulAgraryo 2026 reminds us that storytelling matters. But its deeper challenge should be to make us ask what happens after the story ends. When the lights of the cultural center are turned off, when the certificates are handed out, when the filmmakers return to their classrooms, and when the audience goes home, the farmer remains in the field. The problems of agriculture remain. The land remains. The debt remains. The market remains. The uncertainty remains.

So yes, let the students make films about farmers. Let them tell stories about the land. Let them discover agriculture through cinema. But let us not stop there. Let the films lead to curriculum reform, agricultural education, stronger rural communities, accessible land, meaningful financing, better markets, technology, social protection, and a serious commitment to improving farmers’ lives.

The ultimate success of PelikulAgraryo should not be measured only by the number of excellent films it produces. We should eventually ask a more difficult question. Did the films help create a generation that sees agriculture not as a symbol of poverty that must be escaped, but as a profession worth choosing because it offers dignity, security, creativity, and a future?

That is the real challenge. A short film can make us look at the farmer. What we need now is a society willing to look at the conditions surrounding the farmer. Until we do that, our calls for young people to enter agriculture will remain incomplete. We can teach them to admire the farmer on screen, but if we want them to become farmers themselves, we must first build a world in which the farmer does not have to remain poor in order to be called heroic.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the Secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.