Hanapbuhay : Coping with Informality, Risk, and Insecurity in a Philippine Rice Farming Village

Following the Green Revolution, development narratives have prioritized capital-reliant, input-intensive crop production among smallholders in the Global South. With the right incentives, smallholders will supposedly intensify production by aligning their social relations, economic decisions, and labor with state strategies to optimize inputs and outputs. Yet in the Philippines, experience with input-intensive rice production shows that rising costs, soil degradation, poor prices, and extreme weather have stalled output, forcing many smallholders to reconsider rice farming. These pressures have made the Philippines the world’s largest rice importer, prompting renewed state policies to push for self-sufficiency through new yield-intensification programs. Such policies presume that smallholders, given access to modern inputs and capital, will maximize yields. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with smallholder farmers in Narra, Palawan, this paper examines how these assumptions overlook smallholder adaptation and diversified production within informal economies. Rather than pursuing profit or yield maximization alone, smallholders navigate rice production as part of broader livelihood strategies. They construct coping economies captured by the Filipino term hanapbuhay: securing a living by balancing constraints, diversifying income, and spreading risk. Embedding policy in these everyday realities enables a more grounded approach that moves beyond capital-intensive, yield-centric models toward resilience, equity, and food security.