DAVAO CITY—The government wants the country’s mango exports to increase by 15 percent over the next three years, propped up by a national expansion program and a subsequent rise in per capita consumption of the fruit among Filipinos.

“In broad strokes,” said Director Francisco Ramos of the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) Agribusiness and Marketing Assistance Services (AMAS), “we aim to increase the country’s mango production to two million metric tons by 2020 and increase [the] per capita consumption” among Filipinos.

Ramos said the DA has formulated the medium-term National Strategic Plan for mango, covering the period 2005-2010, which aimed at developing new and expansion areas for mango.

Also called the Philippine mango industry road map, the focus was on expanding existing hectarage in the mango-producing regions in Mindanao by an average of 4,000 hectares and in the rest of the country by an average of 3,000 hectares.

The expansion program was due to the potential of the product to bring in more dollars, after earning P633.4 million last year, up from P548.2 million three years earlier.

“The increase [in earnings] was due to more areas planted to mango, expanding by 6.7 percent from 8,472 hectares in 2003 to 9,038 hectares last year,” Ramos told the First Davao Mango Producers Conference here Tuesday.

The conference gathered most of the mango contractors and growers in the Davao Region, and their colleagues from the Cotabato and Lanao areas in central Mindanao, as well as those from the Zamboanga Peninsula in western Mindanao.

At current hectarage, Mindanao produced a total of 195,000 metric tons of mango worth P3.75 billion. This production was 21 percent of the national output of 919,000 metric tons, valued at P18.7 billion.

“With more areas planted to mango, we thus expect to satisfy the increasing demand for quality Philippine mangoes here and abroad,” Ramos said.

Japan remained as the country’s premium market in Asia, although the US continued to be largely the prime market, especially for the mangoes grown in Guimaras Island off Iloilo province in Western Visayas.

The US has since opened more opportunities by opening up further its island states of Guam and Hawaii to the other mangoes grown elsewhere in the Philippines except in Palawan, which exhibited the fruit flies.

China posed as a new but big market, with Davao growers eyeing a direct trade very soon, owing to its liberal phytosanitary standard that may allow hot water treatment of the fruit.

“Our goal is to develop an additional 130,000 hectares of new mango farms by 2010,” Ramos said, though he qualified that this target would be continually validated and would allow revisions.

Also forming part of the road map was the DA’s target to increase the mango consumption of Filipinos. Ramos said that the Filipino consumers consume only about 11 kilos a year of mango and he said that the DA hoped this would increase to 16 kilos by 2010.

The estimated consumption appeared to be more than what the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) found in its 2003 survey.

The survey has indicated that “there is a drop in the consumption in vegetables and fruits.”

The survey said that consumption of fruits, including mango, sharply dropped to 77 grams in 1993, and ten years later, to only 54 grams. It was nearly double in 1987, at 107 grams.

THE Canadian mining firm TVI Resource Development Philippines Inc. will soon start exploration in Jose Dalman, Zamboanga del Norte, after the tribal council of elders of the Subanen in Tamarok finally agreed to allow mineral exploration in their ancestral land.

THE Department of Agriculture (DA) is drawing up a blueprint for a number of its subsectors to ensure they will contribute to the 4 to 5 percent growth rate being targeted by the department for this year.

DAVAO CITY—The government wants the country’s mango exports to increase by 15 percent over the next three years, propped up by a national expansion program and a subsequent rise in per capita consumption of the fruit among Filipinos.

AN OPPOSITION congressman said Wednesday that Malacañang had itself to blame for the dismal revenue collection during the first quarter of the year, which saw the government missing its target revenue collection by at least 7 percent.

Mr. Macaraig was a taxi driver living on P500 a day. Aside from worsening traffic, high maintenance costs and occasional rarity of customers, the soaring price of gasoline has kept him from getting the most out of his trips and taking home a larger pay.