BAGUIO CITY – The Department of Agriculture in the Cordillera Administrative Region (DA-CAR) has again urged farmers to contact its office for interventions about marketing their crops to ensure there would be no losses.
“The DA and the local governments are with you in relation to the problems you will be encountering with marketing. The Agri-business and Marketing Division (AMAD) has trucks that can deliver if the need is urgent. We can also do Kadiwa for the products,” lawyer Jennilyn Dawayan, regional executive director of DA-CAR, said in an interview on Wednesday.
Dawayan’s pronouncement was made in response to a social media post last week that a Benguet farmer suffered losses after dumping tons of unsold carrots on the roadside.
Apparently, the farmer brought his produce to an agri-trading facility in Nueva Ecija where it stayed for two days but was unable to sell them.
The farmer then transferred to the La Trinidad trading facility but due to the degraded quality of the produce, it was not traded and eventually discarded.
“The problem is dumping but we have been mobilizing our teams to check on the queues at the trading centers and if they see long lines, the Kadiwa is prepared. We have been giving trucks to FCAs (farmers cooperatives and associations) and the local government units (LGUs). We have also been giving capital to FCSs and LGUs. We also directly link farmers to institutional buyers and we have done that in a lot of our initiatives to restaurants and other factories,” Dawayan said.
She explained that farmers’ cooperatives have been advised to inform the municipal agriculture offices, mayor’s offices, the provincial agriculturist and the DA-CAR in case they need marketing linkage for their unsold products.
“We have been linking them using our trucks so that they can sell directly to the buyers like offices of government locally or in other provinces or regions to ensure that they do not lose their capital,” she said.
Aside from vegetables, Dawayan said they also monitor the harvest of other crops such as palay in Kalinga and Apayao and mangoes in Abra in order to assist the farmers in their marketing needs.
“If they need to transport like the rice from Kalinga and Apayao, we have trucks and logistics that enabled the farmers to sell directly to the buyers at lower costs like the PHP1,050 per sack of 25 kilograms that allowed the consolidated sale of PHP2 million for that activity,” she said.
La Trinidad Mayor Romeo Salda in an earlier media interview said they have established a system where once informed, the LGU would buy the product and give it away to households or offices to prevent wastage.
He said that based on their investigation, the farmer whose crops were discarded “came from a private facility and we did not know of their situation. We should have been informed and we will extend a hand just like what we did with the others who experienced the same problem.” **Liza Agoot
