The Philippines, host to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), is the birthplace of Asia’s “Green Revolution” in rice production. In the second half of the 1970s, the country, a rice importer for a century, attained self-sufficiency in rice production. In the 1980s, it reverted to the status of a major rice importer. The agricultural sector has also declined continuously, with the Philippines becoming more and more dependent on imported agricultural products ranging from rice and corn to vegetables and fruits and milk and meat. The sector’s share in the GDP has plunged from 25% in 1980 to less than 10% today. The paper argues that this dismal development in Philippine agriculture was due primarily to policy errors, starting with the adoption wholesale by the government of a disastrous “agricultural deregulation” program imposed by the World Bank. This deregulation program has been compounded by the failure of the government to provide a holistic and pro-farmer development blueprint for the sector, on the one hand, and the persistence by the neo-liberal economic technocrats in pursuing a rudderless liberalization program for the sector, on the other.