The Philippine society confronts formidable longer-term economic problems. The exhaustion of the land frontier suitable for production of present crops under existing techniques, which is compounded by degradation of the environment by wasteful harvesting of forestry resources and over-exploitation of inshore fisheries is an obvious problem. A comparable problem arises in the inertia built into the age structure of the Philippine population. In 1970, those under 15 years of age accounted for 45.6 per cent of all Filipinos and estimated population growth in the 1970s was 2.7 per cent, a rate more than double the “zero-growth rate”. If the growth rate should fall to the “zero-growth rate” tomorrow, the Philippine population would continue to grow for the better part of a century and would virtually double as cohorts of Filipinos entering the reproductive age group would continue to increase for many years.