DA issues registration rules for agricultural machinery

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Agriculture (DA) has issued guidelines to roll out the national database on registered agricultural and fisheries machinery and equipment in compliance with Republic Act 10601 or the Agricultural and Fisheries Mechanization Law (AFMech Law).

It directed the Bureau of Agricultural and Fisheries Engineering (BAFE) and Philippine Center for Postharvest Development and Mechanization (PHilMech) to implement the online registration of agricultural and fisheries machinery and equipment.

The attached agencies are also tasked to maintain the national database on registered agricultural and fisheries machinery and equipment.

Under the cooperation, BAFE and PhilMech will have data sharing and security like access protocols to BAFE, DA-Regional Agricultural Engineering divisions, provincial agriculture offices, local government units, among others.

The two agencies will also work together to maintain existing mechanization databases; organize and implement briefings, workshops, training, and information dissemination on subjects of mutual interest; enhance manpower skills and capability enhancement; and for hardware support.

Ahead of the issuance of the guidelines, the technical working group chaired by PhilMech developed the online registration information system known as AFMechERN-Registration of ownership of Agricultural and Fisheries Machinery and Equipment System (RAFMES).

Relative to this, BAFE and PhilMech have entered into a memorandum of agreement (MOA) for the collaborative undertaking on rolling out the registration system as a ground-level system of registration by the city/municipal local government units (LGUs), in collaboration with the DA’s regional field offices (RFOs) through their Regional Agricultural Engineering Divisions (RAEDs) and the provincial LGUs.

Under the guidelines, registration data will be encoded at the city and municipal government levels through RAFMES.

The RAFMES system account for operators shall be managed by PHilMech while the data account for users shall be managed by BAFE.

PhilMech and BAFE will jointly create an application programming interface (API) to facilitate data sharing between RAFMES and the latter’s agricultural and biosystems engineering management information system.

As for the funding for the MOA and the hardware support, the DA said this would be shared among BAFE, PHilMech, DA-RAEDs and the LGUs.

BAFE and PHilMech are directed to establish a project management team (PMT) to oversee the implementation of the MOA.