BAGUIO CITY – Department of Agriculture in the Cordillera (DA-CAR) OIC-Regional Executive Director Atty. Jennilyn Dawayan and her technical staff met with practicing journalists of the Baguio Correspondents and Broadcasters Club (BCBC) in an informal “Meet and Greet” session, to look for collaborative efforts between the department and the media organization to strengthen and widen the reach of the communication better to the farmers in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR).
BCBC is a 70-year-old organization of print and broadcast journalists coming from different television and radio broadcast stations, and publication companies in Baguio City similar to the National Press Club (NPC) in Metro Manila.
Dawayan in her opening message shared with the journalists the policy direction of the DA. Secretary Francisco Tiu-Laurel seeks to pursue.
“The Secretary has many plans that he wishes to achieve, among these is the accuracy of agricultural data which is the basis for importation, and coming from the private sector, the Secretary is knowledgeable particularly on how supply and demand works especially in the field where he comes from. I think he is putting experts in place on how to go about data management by January next year aside from the Secretary’s plan to hire expert cost accountants to determine the real cost of production of certain commodities,” Dawayan explained.
The move of the Agriculture Secretary to hire cost accountants aims to assist farmers in determining their production and pricing, ensuring commodities are within the budget chain that will not only reduce the logistics cost but the overall cost of food. Secretary Tiu-Laurel has earlier reiterated his stand of being pro-production and not pro-importation.
Dawayan also shared with the journalist the policy direction DA-CAR seeks to pursue in 2024 to achieve its target of supporting and empowering the Cordillera farmers.
“The Secretary wants a bottoms-up planning of all regional offices including DA-CAR since being the people on the ground, the regional offices know the needs of its constituents. Based on the Secretary’s experience in their business, he said that he got most of the solutions on the ground which was his strategy,” the Regional Director stated.
Tiu-Laurel has instructed all regional agriculture offices to come up with their regional priorities with the CAR region giving priority to highland vegetables, heirloom rice, strawberries, milk, yellow corn wherein we are 100 percent sufficient, and rice.
“With these challenges that we have, we are ramping up our support to rice-producing areas in the region, particularly Kalinga, Apayao, and Abra. And the area that we are considering will have a possible increase in the production of rice is Abra because of the wider land area it has,” Dawayan added.
The “Meet and Greet” also discussed agricultural concerns on African Swine Fever, water impounding concerns and price increases of rice, corn production, livestock, and egg production costing. By JTLlanes