Mayors nursing nurseries
My commentary last week on nurseries as anchors for agriculture development elicited great interest. To follow up what action should be taken to promote this, we discovered that mayors are the key to nursing anchor nursery development.
Clarito Barron, Director of the Bureau of Plant Industry, said in an interview that there are approximately 220 nurseries in the country. However, only 60 percent are accredited by the BPI.
Firstly, 220 nurseries are too few to address our country’s needs. This means that there is only one nursery for every seven municipalities. There should be at least four times this number.
Secondly, 40 percent of these nurseries are selling seedlings that may not produce the right quality of output (e.g. fruit trees, vegetables, crops, etc.). This means that we will not meet our agricultural growth objectives. In addition, those buying these seedlings are being cheated.
For example, a person buys a mango seedling that is defective. He invests both time and money for four years waiting for the trees to bear the mangoes, only to find out that he has been cheated.
This is why Barron emphasizes the importance of BPI nursery accreditation. When I asked him if BPI could do something significant to solve this problem, he said that the answer lies with the mayors. Under the Local Government Code, the mayors, not the Department of Agriculture, are primarily responsible for agriculture development. BPI can only respond to the requests for assistance from these mayors. But BPI is getting few such requests.
Progressive mayor
We talked to a progressive mayor in the Visayas. In his municipality, there is one private nursery and six LGU municipal nurseries. The private nursery sells seedlings for lemoncito, string beans and other vegetables. The municipality has one LGU nursery for palay, coconut and fruit-bearing trees. The five other LGU nurseries are in the mountainous areas selling only fruit tree seedlings. Not one of the seven nurseries is accredited.
When I asked the mayor why there was no nursery accreditation, he said that he had not thought of it. He is now interested in getting this accreditation so that the seedlings from the different nurseries would at least result in the right output. When I told him that BPI accreditation involves not only right seedling verification, but also assistance on how to care for these seedlings, he became doubly interested.
Today, the nurseries generally limit themselves to selling seedlings. But if BPI accreditation will now include the ability to do technology transfer on how to raise these seedlings to the seedling buyers, this would be a valuable service. If the nurseries can additionally suggest and even help arrange potential markets for the eventual produce of these seedlings, then the nursery would become an effective anchor for agriculture development.
Recommendation
The DA budget increased by more than three times, from P19 billion in 2007 to P63 billion (P73 billion with DA-attached agencies) this year. Barron said DA had enough resources to accredit the many more nurseries needed in this country. However, there are few requests from the mayors. Therefore, an increase of only 10 percent in accredited nurseries is planned for this year. Truly, the mayors can solve this problem.
In the past, they were required to have municipal agriculture plans. This is not so today. If the mayors have no municipal agriculture plan and they are the ones responsible for agriculture development, then it should not come as a surprise that our agriculture development has stagnated.
We recommend that municipal agriculture development plans be a requirement before a municipality can get any assistance from DA’s P73-billion budget. A necessary part of this agriculture plan will be an evaluation of whether nurseries are needed in a given municipality. If so, the existing and planned nurseries should be identified. This way, BPI accreditation can then be planned and executed. This will enable the nurseries to fulfill their potential as important anchors for agricultural development and achieve inclusive growth in our impoverished countryside.
(The author is chair of Agriwatch, former Secretary for Presidential Flagship Programs and Projects, and former Undersecretary for Agriculture, Trade and Industry. For inquiries and suggestions, e-mail [email protected] or telefax (02) 8522112).
