Government interventions, through the Department of Agriculture’s National Livestock Program (NLP), for the past years focused on enhancing incomes and profitability and improve competitiveness for the livestock and poultry subsectors, especially for the small players. The endgoal of the NLP 2011-2016 is to increase swine and chicken production from1.898 million metric ton (MMT) and 1.353 MMT to 2.159 MMT and 1.765 MMT,respectively. Likewise, the program seeks to improve the net profit-cost ratio from 0.11 and 0.286 to 0.15 and 0.288 for swine and chicken industries,respectively.

With the advent of the new Philippine Development Plan2011-2016 and the crafting of the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Plan2011-2017, it is opportune time to conduct a swine and chicken baseline survey.The baseline survey will assess the status of swine and chicken producers,especially the small players, in order for the Department to eventually evaluate the impact of the National Livestock Program interventions in the medium term. What is more important is to have better policy and program interventions that will improve the service to the local swine and chicken producers.

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