The socio demographic characteristics of selected farmers in Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao del Norte
Description
The global COVID-19 pandemic leads to the fatal economic condition of Asian countries and brings miserable situations to rural farmers. According to Awad and Konn (2020), this pandemic greatly hits the developing countries and creates an economic slowdown in industry and agricultural sectors. It could be seen in the native place of Maguindanao province where most farmers faced challenges with their farming activities amidst pandemic. Some of these are the loss of marketable disposal of their harvest due to travel restrictions, low price of output, lacking of laborers, and etc. Despite massive program against corona virus disease, public sectors could not figure out those impacts associated with high rate of poverty observed within marginalized farmers and to women. Thus, farmer-producers consistently confront risks along with losing yield and income. The study reveals that of all thirteen (13) challenges and risk identified, low yield or harvest was the highest factor neither felt or unfelt by the farmers (ẋ=3.12), followed by dropping farm gate price(ẋ=3.11), limited funds for buying primary needs(ẋ=3.09), limited access to credit, and low revenue or sales(ẋ=3.06). The least unfelt factor was when they consider of discontinuing farming operation (ẋ=2.09) due to pandemic situation. Moreover, the top three (3) coping mechanism and strategies employed by farmers to recover from production losses were self labored and personalized farming activity (46.7%), followed by access to other type of job (41%), and lastly lessen capital requirement (37.1%) and integrate farming with other commodities, such as vegetables, poultry and livestock (37.1%). The least choice was transferring to other address (6.7%). As to their concerned issues, respondents implied that failure or loss of income was their main concerned during pandemic (77.1%), they were afraid of acquiring low yield which affects their cash operations in their farming business. If they have low yield, then it reflects that they have limited or no sufficient funds to purchase even basic needs (76.2%). And this resulted to the poor family condition (52.4%), which belong to the top three (3) concerns of the farmers. With the results observed, it further elaborates that all challenges, risk, and concerns were directly associated with one scenario. Although in the part of the farmers, merely recognized that it has domino effects, but with the sequence and listed results shown in the study. Its offshoot realized great impact was still felt by small farmers during pandemic outbreak.