Cebu’s agro-industrial potential

I was in the town of Alegria last Saturday upon the invitation of Mayor Verna V. Magallon to attend their 4th Municipal Organic Agriculture Congress and Agro-Fair.

The town of Alegria has been faithfully giving priority to the sustainable development of their farming communities, with the organic agriculture congress and agro-fair as among the highlights of the town fiesta celebration which culminates today, December 3.

This year’s organic agriculture congress and agro-fair was with the support of the Cebu Provincial Government, National Anti-Poverty Commission, Department of Agriculture, and the Saint Peter Academy of Alegria Foundation.

Agro-fairs like this provide a peek at the potential of Cebu as an agro-industrial powerhouse in the country. And I say this with all seriousness, because the only essential things we need to develop as an agro-industrial center are community level innovation and good public governance.

Cebu does not have much agricultural land to develop compared to its neighboring provinces; that is why our emphasis should be agro-industrial. That means we have to shift our focus from selling raw agricultural products toward developing farming technologies and processing raw crops from our island and neighboring provinces into value-added products.

While agro-industries development is primarily a private sector activity, government and the public sector at various levels from the local to the national line agencies have a crucial role to play. Government’s role is to continue with the process of reforms that create a good business climate and an enabling environment for agro-industries to thrive.

That’s a huge challenge considering that the Philippines still has the highest rural poverty rate in ASEAN. According to University of Asia and Pacific professor and economist Rolando Dy in report in The Philippine STAR, Philippine agriculture is only modern by 10 percent compared to the over 50 percent average in Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia.

Among the things we need to do is to strengthen our rules-based system so that it will encourage investments and reward innovators. Government regulators often focus on the regulation aspect and forget, either by inadvertence or on purpose, their mission to encourage more and better players in the market.

For example, and allow me to digress a bit, I’ve heard of a new and innovative product that is designed to be a legal and safe alternative to the illegal butane canisters proliferating in the Cebu market today – the LPG in refillable canisters. What is the government, specifically the Department of Energy, doing to facilitate the entry and realization of such new ideas, good products, and marketing innovations?

Going back to agro-industrial development, we also need to develop the input conditions for agro-industrial products. These conditions include the development of human resources and the provision of capital resources and physical infrastructure.

Agro-fairs, meanwhile, facilitate networking among producers, processors, entrepreneurs, and consumers. Sometimes the technology is already there and what must be done is to bring the technology to the producers who shall then seek to develop supply and demand conditions.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has identified the enablers for agro-industry competitiveness from the necessary conditions to the sufficient conditions: Trade policy, infrastructure, and land tenure and property rights, called the essential enablers; financial services, research and development, and standards and regulations, called the important enablers; and business linkages, business development services, and ease of doing business, called the useful enablers.

We simply need to act on this knowledge and act fast, unless we allow self-interest to, again and as usual, rule over the interest of the nation.