The pride of Northern Samar

It is a most appealing business. The raw materials are abundant and, therefore, cheap. And the demand for the finished product is increasing.

That is what Pitad, Inc., a company formed by a Northern Samar-based non-government organization called Pitad Foundation, discovered when it transformed coconut coir or the husk that comes from the coconut fruit into geotextile.

"This is a more practical and ecological means to deal with our sloping road slides The net covers the soil and prevents its slide. Grass is planted over the net. When strong wind blows parallel to the ground, the grass protects the soil from the impact of the rainfall," said executive director Sam Gelera.

The cost of using geotextile and grass is about P150 per square meter while using concrete would cost P1,000 per square meter.

Profitable

The project was spurred by the intervention of the Department of Science and Technology, which provided a seed fund amounting to P395,000 for the fabrication and installation of a decorticating machine as well as a coco fiber twining machine that cost P140,000.

"In this business, the major capitalization comes from the equipment," said Gelera. Because of the assistance provided by the DoST and its unit, the Metals Industry Research and Development Center, Pitad increased its daily production of twine or cords from 30 kilograms to 200 kilos. In turn, this enabled the company to produce 370 square meters of geotextile per day, resulting in an 88.75% increase in profits from P18,000 to P160,000 a month.

"We are getting more orders for geotextile than we can produce. At the rate we are filling up the orders, we can easily make P22,000 every day in revenues from geotextile alone," said Gelera.

Beginnings

A Waray term meaning tools, Pitad’s mother company, Pitad Foundation was formed in February 1992 by nine engineers in various fields from the University of Eastern Philippines in Catarman, Northern Samar, reputedly the poorest province in the country. The foundation put up the manufacturing company in 1996 with a P3.7 million funding from the Inter Church Organization of the Netherlands. It began operations in October 1997 as a contract producer of garden aids and agricultural products, fashion accessories and novelty items made from coconut coir for both the local and export markets.

From a production line of six, including weavers and embroiderers working from their homes, the company now has a workforce of 80 in its five coco processing plants in Northern Samar. To cope with huge market orders, the company has also branched out of the province, buying a closed coco coir operation in Bicol.

For its raw material, Pitad uses an Elf truck to make the rounds of farms and buy coconut husk at P100 per 1,000 pieces, a significant improvement from the time when these were just burned or converted into charcoal by farmers.

"Since all the founders are engineers, Pitad has had access to different decorticating machine designs and other gadgets needed to convert the husk into versatile coir and nets. In fact, the company is now also producing decorticating and twining machines from Sri Lanka, which we have redesigned. We have brought down the cost of the decorticating machine from P800,000 to P300,000," Gelera said, adding a Vietnamese has approached the company to develop the technology for his company. "We refused because this is a product that the Filipino will benefit from first."

Plans

So far this year, Pitad has already earned $14,000 from its export shipments. The company projects to earn $10 million from exports alone, which currently account for 60% of total production.

To be more competitive, the company needs 48 more twining machines on top of the 12 currently in use.

In the longer term, Pitad envisions Eastern Visayas as a productive and progressive agro-industrialized economy anchored on community-based people-centered fair trade and an environmentally-sound, socio-economic support system. Towards this end, it has set up 14 barangay coconut coir manufacturing plants, equipped with first-class decorticators, which will bring their output to the big barangay plants for further processing.

For this dream to come through, Pitad has applied for a loan with the Agricultural Competitiveness Enhancement Fund of the Department of Agriculture.