In accordance with the Department of Agriculture (DA) Administrative Order 27, the DA-Cordillera initiated its F2C2 Program Regional Orientation Consultation, and FY2024 planning workshop. The primary objective is to orient various stakeholders about the program, strategies, and targets.
DA-AO 27 sets into motion the previous administration’s farm consolidation and clustering program to attain economies of scale, and enable more farmers, fishers, and agripreneurs to produce and earn more from their toil.
The DA’s Farm and Fisheries Clustering and Consolidation (F2C2) Program is the first formal, comprehensive, and holistic government initiative to be implemented at the national level.
Atty. Jennilyn Dawayan, DA-Cordillera (DA-CAR) Regional Technical Director for Research and Regulations, explained that this project is trying to highlight the strategies developed during the previous administration in terms of consolidation and that with the advent of guidelines being issued, the stakeholders will be able to define the meaning of consolidation.
“Our problem today is not actually the food security but food affordability; the prices of commodities have increased based on PSA data, which means that consolidation would all the more be appreciated because it is the manner of bringing down the prices that are high as of the moment so that they would know marketing schemes which we want to achieve under consolidation,” Dawayan said.
Regional Corn Coordinator Gerardo Banawa of DA-CAR explained that the F2C2 cluster development plan started with the corn program of the government during the time of then-President Estrada, with beneficiaries of the corn program clustered as an association which would further strengthen their management capabilities, through the implementation of the said AO covering all banner programs of the DA.
“The 2024 national corn program plan under the F2C2 guidelines focuses on the identification of each region and supports one model corn-cassava cluster per province. This is to strengthen the cluster to become consolidators to directly sell to the dealers and the integrators. They can become farm service providers, or agricultural and fisheries machinery service centers following their NC2 certification, allowing them to troubleshoot farm and fisheries machinery,” Banawa stated.
The average size of farms in the Philippines has dwindled from three hectares per family/holding in the 1980s to only 0.9 hectares in 2012, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
In a survey conducted by the PSA 11 years ago, it showed the country then had 5.56 million farms, totaling 7.2 million hectares, of which more than one-half (57 percent) were one hectare, and less, one-third or 32 percent were one to three hectares, 9 percent were three to seven hectares, and 2 percent seven hectares and more.
In the fishery sector, the vast majority of Filipino fishers remain tied to very small boats that can only go as far as the municipal water boundaries.
Through the F2C2 program, the government will be able to efficiently channel assistance such as credit, modern production methods, farm machinery, post-harvest and program facilities, transport and logistics, packaging support, as well as information and communication technologies, to farm and fishery clusters.
The F2C2 program will focus on community production and processing projects to promote coordinated value chain systems, attaining cost-efficiency compared with stand-alone traditional farming and fishing practices.
