BUKIDNON—The regional field office (RFO) of the Department of Agriculture (DA) is targeting to more than double the area planted with coffee here following President Duterte’s pronouncement that the DA will get a bigger budget next year.
With a bigger budget, Carlota S. Madriaga, regional technical director for Operations of DA-RFO 10, said the agency will be able to double coffee areas in Bukidnon to 26,000 hectares by 2022, from the current 11,000 hectares. Bukidnon is a province that is well known for producing world-class coffee beans.
“We have a set a target of 15,000-hectare expansion until 2022. [The RFO] was instructed by Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol to increase our budget proposal,” Madriaga told reporters in an interview on the sidelines of Nestlé Philippines Inc.’s coffee-buying activities here on Wednesday.
“The 15,000-hectare expansion could be achieved in less than three years if we will be given the budget,” she added.
Citing data from the Philippine Statistics
Authority (PSA), Madriaga said Northern Mindanao currently produces about 2,000
metric tons (MT) of green coffee beans
(GCB) annually.
Madriaga did not give an estimate as to how much the regional office would need for their target. But Wilson Lagdamen, DA-RFO 10 senior agriculturist, said the agency spends P1.2 million to procure 50,000 seedlings.
One hectare of coffee area would require an average of 800 seedlings, according to Lagdamen.
To hit its target, the regional office would need to spend at least P288 million to provide 12 million seedlings, according to the computation of the BusinessMirror.
This year, DA-RFO 10 procured 50,000 robusta coffee seedlings and 20,000 arabica coffee seedlings. The agency spent P300,000 for the seedlings and another P5 million for its coffee nursery establishments.
The region also plans to hike its average GCB yield to about 1 metric ton per hectare by 2022 from the current 230 kilograms per hectare, Madriaga said.
She said this can be done by providing farmers with high-yielding seedlings or plantlets.
Madriaga said the agency has distributed 4 million seedlings to coffee farmers in the region since 2015. She said the DA-RFO 10 has been procuring and distributing high-quality planting materials to farmers in partnership with Nestlé.
Data from the PSA indicated that the Philippines produced 60,310 MT of coffee last year, 2.84 percent lower than the 62,080 MT produced in 2017.
In the fourth quarter of 2018 alone, the country produced 29,600 MT of coffee, 0.80 percent higher than the 29,360 MT recorded in the fourth quarter of 2017.