Bohol will pilot in Central Visayas the World Bank (WB)-aided Philippine Rural Development Program (PRDP), which cost billions nationwide, that taps the province’s potential for coconut agro-industry hub. This is another major approach to attaining the “BIG LEAP”---Bohol’s Inclusive Growth Leads to Equitable Prosperity. Gov. Edgar Chatto hopes the innovation, which is jointly funded by the WB and Philippine government with local counterpart, will make the farmers create value-added products and develop related supply chains. The PRDP is a six-year national government platform for an inclusive, value chain-oriented, and climate resilient agriculture and fisheries sector. The program focuses on a particular widespread crop which huge sector that depends on it as an income source remains economically low despite the potential growth of the industry.

Chatto said the desired development is very much attainable thru necessary support infrastructure and facilities, proper technology, processing of diversified value-added by-products, competitive marketing and sustained enhancement of resources. The governor himself led the team of provincial planning, agriculture and finance officials and technical people to a workshop in Cebu as part of the project’s on-going planning stage with the major funding agencies. The PRDP intends to make Bohol a template in agri-based infrastructure, entrepreneurship, job creation and livelihood development utilizing the coconut sector. The programs major components include the I-BUILD or Intensified Building Up of Infrastructure and Logistics Development and I-REAP or Investments in Rural Enterprise and Agriculture and Fisheries Productivity. Beyond subsistence production to alleviate poverty, the I-REAP aims to crate marketable surplus of commodities. It elevates production into the next levels of the value chain by installing production and market facilities, establishing enterprises, and up-scaling products at an appropriate commodity value chain segment, among others.

CHALLENGES AND DEV’T STRATEGY

About 54% of Bohol population are employed or work in agriculture, indicating that most of the poor households are in the farm sector. The country’s 10th coconut producer, Bohol has almost 160,000 farmers engaged in growing the crop, cultivating lands considered to be small farm sizes from .25 to two hectares. Traditionally, most coconuts are sold for copra and about 90% of total copra production are sold to village traders, although some farmers have formed cooperatives. A number of these cooperatives have experienced failure owing to lack of funds to sustain their purchase of nuts from the farmers. There are no mills in Bohol, but the region has five, accounting for about 10% of the country’s annual crushing capacity.

For lack of resources, Bohol coconut farmers cannot adopt various marketing and value-adding activities to improve their income, forcing them to get low prices for their traditional product and limited incentives for farm productivity. They need capital, technical assistance, facilities and equipment, and market information to enable them to undertake processing and put up village-level enterprises for producing higher-value products, improve product quality and forge linkages with favorable markets. According to OIC Provincial Agriculturist Larry Pamugas, the coco-based agro-industrial hub will showcase viable and emerging coconut processing technologies in an integrated system. Its infrastructure will provide facilities and support the set-up of new world-class technologies that help the local industry penetrate both the domestic and export markets.

The hub will have components like coco sap processing, dry processing and wet processing facilities, replanting-rehabilitation-fertilization-intercropping, and agri-tourism. As it creates more jobs in the coconut industry, the project ensures a sustainable local economy that intends to attain inclusive growth in the agriculture sector and sub-sectors. Chatto identified tourism and agriculture or agri-business as two of the three legs of Bohol’s economic tripod for growth and development. The third one is information technology – business process outsourcing (IT-BPO). The PRDP-packaged project alone is foreseen to serve one-tenth of Bohol’s total households. (Ven rebo Arigo)