Understanding family farming in the Philippine context

There is an underrepresentation of voices from Asia in the global family farming discourse. To respond to this gap, this paper seeks to understand family farming in the Philippines to provide more nuanced and context-specific insights especially in light of diversity of societal challenges and overall farming environments. Context-specific insights are important in guiding policies that could significantly impact family farmers. The Food Systems Approach guided the analysis of this paper. An important concept that emerged from our findings is the concept of “love” as a salient element that relates to family farming. “Love” rarely figures in the literature on family farming. We explore “love” as it relates to cooperation and succession along with its theoretical and pragmatic implications with respect to family farming debates. Hence, we advance that “love” may help shape (or not) policies with respect to family farming in the future.