SABLAN, Benguet – The municipal government is maximizing the use of its 10-hectare demonstration farm in Sitio Payda, barangay Bayabas to produce more planting materials of fruit-bearing trees to help in improving the supply of sweet-tempered fruits that thrive in the municipality.
Mayor Alfredo Dacumos, Jr. said that the municipal government will be dividing the property into parcels with an area of approximately 5,000 square meters each to be able to propagate various species of fruit bearing trees that are grown in the locality to ensure the availability of planting materials for the preferred type of specie needed by the residents who want to produce the different kinds of fruits available.
“We want to improve the availability of fruits for our increasing number of customers who patronize the fruits that are produced by our farmers. We want to concretize the identity of Sablan as the fruit basket of Benguet and provide our residents with sustainable sources of livelihood,” Mayor Dacumos stressed.
Among the fruits that are popularly produced in the municipality include banana, pineapple, durian, lanzones, dragon fruit, rambutan and marang.
The municipal chief executive requested the Municipal Agriculture Office to further conduct a study on other fruits that thrive best in the locality so that more planting materials will be propagated in the demo farm to guarantee the availability of the materials for farmers who are interested to grow other kinds of fruits in their farms .
However, he admitted that the recent wrath of Supertyphoon Egay, Typhoons Goring and Hana and the enhanced southwest monsoon had significantly affected the supply of fruits that had been offered to residents and visitors during the recently concluded 9th edition of the town’s fruit festival that is why the prices of the locally produced fruits were quite high.
Sablan has been positioned as the fruit basket of Benguet because of its conducive climate as the town is situated between the highlands and the lowlands suitable for the propagation of semi-temperate fruits that have been previously available in low-lying communities, like in Mindanao in the case of durian.
According to him, the municipal government is also working on the possible return of the production of banana which had been heavily impacted by a virus in the late 1990s that caused the eradication of vast tracks of banana plantations in the municipality.
He claimed that the available banana planting materials are mostly tissue-cultured that is why the local government is looking into other planting materials produced in the farms, especially for the production of the endemic type of banana ‘lakatan’ to make it available to interested farmers wanting to bring back the identity of the municipality as a major banana producer not only in the province but also in the whole Cordillera.
The mayor emphasized that the municipal government will continue coordinating with concerned government agencies to further improve the local fruit production and make the industry a sustainable source of livelihood for the residents considering that Sablan, a fifth class municipality located in the western section of Baguio City and part of the Baguio-La Trinidad-Itogon-Sablan-Tuba-Tublay (BLISTT) growth area.
