Agriculture

By Rose de la Cruz What took the leadership of former Undersecretary for Rice Industry Development Leocadio Sebastian months to organize, mobilize and scale – the Masagana Rice Industry Development Program (MIRDP) – was overridden by the exemptions sought by regional directors from the voucher system, a vital strategy of MIRDP and the return to procurement and distribution by RDOs …

In keeping with President Marcos and Agriculture Secrretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr.’s desire to build more warehouses and cold storage facilities to prolong the shelf life and maintain the quality of palay, rice and other agricultural produce, the Philippine Rice Research Institute with funding from the Korea Rural Community Corp. broke ground for a 540-square meter warehouse cum cold storage …

Agriculture Secretary Francisco P. Tiu Laurel, Jr. said he would  propose significant changes in DA’s  2025 budget to achieve President Marcos, Jr.’s goal of modernizing agriculture, increased food production and food security. “The budget in 2025 will be very different from this year’s,” Laurel told members of the Philippine Chamber of Agriculture and Food Inc. (PCAFI) recently. Apart from pushing …

Left in the dark over the controversial resorts built within the periphery of the Chocolate Hills in Sagbayan, Bohol, a declared protected park, Tourism Secretary Ma.Esperanza  Christina Garcia- Frasco asked to have a seat in the Protected Area Management Board of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to prevent a recurrence of such controversies that would affect the country’s …

By Rose de la Cruz At a time when El Nino is battering sugar plantations in Negros Occidental (the sugar center of the country) and Batangas, the United States is enticing us to export our raw sugar when the country already face the specter of a looming sugar shortage. The export of class A sugar (or the quota for the …

By Rose de la Cruz Regardless of an expected P1.23 billion losses to agriculture from El Nino, the Philippine Statistics Authority made its bravest projection that palay production for the first quarter would still hit 4.8 million metric tons, slightly higher than the 4.78 MMT for the comparative period in 2023. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council had …

By Rose de la Cruz It took House Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez to involve a full-blown House probe into the illegal operation of a resort inside the Chocolate Hills protected park that was supposed to host this year a swimming competition by the local government of Bohol, despite a closure order slapped by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. …

With 100,000 hectares of sugarcane fields in the country’s sugar capital – Bacolod, Negros Occidental –  having been affected by the ongoing drought, supply will be further tight and would necessitate more imports. The United Sugar Producers Federations of the Philippines (UNIFED) said rising temperatures and lack of rain have devastated vast tracts of sugarcane fields in the Negros provinces, …

The Department of Agriculture has alloted P24.9-billion for machineries procurement of the Philippine Center for Postharvest Development and Mechanization (PHilMech) even as PhilMech has distributed 26,412 farm equipment over the last four years funded by the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund. The farm machineries, distributed between mid-2020 and March 3, 2024 were delivered to 368 local government units (LGUs) and 6,385 …

President Marcos has appointed four more top officials at the Department of Agriculture, virtually filling up all top vacant positions in DA. Appointed were DA National Rice Program Undersecretary Christopher Morales, Cheryl Marie NatividadpCaballero as Undersecretary for High Value Crops, academician Dexter Respicio Buted, former president of the Pangasinan State University as board member of the Philippine Coconut Authority and …