The Israeli government will increase to 500 the number of Filipinos to its 11-month agriculture internship program to help in boosting their skills and knowledge that will contribute in efforts to improve the agriculture sector in the Philippines as announced by the Israeli Ambassador to the Philippines Ilan Fluss.
He pointed out that Israel has embarked on smart agriculture that maximizes the outputs and minimizes the inputs, save water, use quality seeds for production and lessens the use of pesticides and chemicals among others.
Ambassador Fluss underscored that the agriculture interns will be taught to change their mindset of seeing agriculture as subsistence farming but instead as a business or economic activity.
Further, he added that the qualified interns will work with Israeli farmers for hands-on training on the latest technology they are using to improve their production which the interns can learn and use to start improve the state of agriculture in their home bases.
According to him, agriculture in Israel is profitable that makes it a sustainable business and Filipinos can also do the same to make agriculture one of the country’s major economic drivers with the vast tracks of agricultural lands in the country that could be developed with the use of appropriate technologies for better production.
He claimed that every year, Israel accepts a few hundred Filipino interns in the agriculture sector to undergo the 11-month internship program but the Israeli government decided to increase the number of interns to allow more Filipinos to avail of the program to benefit the agricultural industry in the Philippines.
The Israeli envoy revealed he met a number of alumni of the internship program in the different parts of the country over the past several months and he is elated at how these intern returnees passed on to their fellow agriculture industry stakeholders the lessons they learned in improving agriculture-related activities.
Part of the Israel agriculture internship program are the studies the qualified interns have to undertake for them to learn the appropriate technologies to make agriculture activities profitable as an economic activity geared towards improving the lives of Filipino farmers.
Fluss expressed confidence that more Filipinos will be interested to avail of the internship program on agriculture of the Israeli government to help in further enhancing the state of agriculture in the Philippines in the future.