For 2018, the Department of Agriculture will be focusing on food production, mechanization, loaning program and its 10-year dairy program, its top official said.
In an interview, Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said the agency’s budget for the first half of 2018 would be spent on these priority programs in line with President Duterte’s directive to focus on local needs.
“He said we should satisfy the requirements of the Filipinos first. We’ve always campaigned for our export products not realizing that the Philippines is a market of more than a hundred Filipinos,” said Pinol. “Why do we go around the world promoting our coffee when we’re also importing coffee?”
To do this, he said there would be less participation from the department in international marketing shows next year.
The DA is also looking to give incentives to processing and manufacturing companies that would use local agricultural materials in their operations.
The Philippine Partners for Sustainable Agriculture (PPSA) would be coordinating with the DA on the list of products that would be given incentives.
“We had an agreement with PPSA that they would look into the best practices of other countries like Thailand which has adopted this scheme, and they would present a position paper to the House and the Senate,” he said.
The DA would be seeking the support of Senators Cynthia Villar, Loren Legarda and Francis Pangilinan, alongside Anac-IP Rep. Jose Panganiban to sponsor the bill which they were targeting to submit before the end of the year.
“Now is a critical period for agriculture because we are nearing self-sufficiency in several products like corn and rice,” said Pinol. “The main motivation for greater productivity is the price and marketability of the product.”
For the 10-year dairy program set to begin next year, Piñol said the agency is set to purchase 6,000 heifers from Brazil and cattle embryo from Argentina to boost Philippine dairy production and reduce our reliance on imports before the end of President Duterte’s term.
The secretary is expecting to bring the country’s dairy production to 10 percent of the national requirement from the current 1.8 percent and increase the cattle population to five million from 2.5 million in five years.
The program is said to be backed by a P3.7-billion fund from the agency’s budget proposal for 2018, P1 billion from the Philippine Rural Development Program (PRDP) and P209 million under the US government’s overseas aid scheme known as the Public Law 480 fund.
“We will focus on the Philippine market first, and if there would be any excess from our commodities outside of our traditional export products like bananas, pineapples, coconut, and mangoes, then that’s the only time that we will be exporting,” Piñol said.
For 2018, the DA would have a budget of P110.75 billion—the seventh biggest allocation in the P3.7-trillion 2018 national budget—for the benefit of 11 million farmers and fisherfolk.
The agriculture chief is hopeful his department will get at least P120 billion for 2018.