Government-owned Coconut Industry Investment Fund Oil Mills Group (CIIF-OMG) has agreed to increase its buying price for copra to P20 per kilogram, Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol said on Wednesday.
Piñol said CIIF-OMG President Aquilino D. Trinidad made the announcement during the recent consultation held by the Department of Agriculture (DA) with coconut farmers and other stakeholders in the coconut industry.
“The P20 per kilo mill-gate price is still P5 lower than what the DA had earlier asked but Trinidad said it is the best they could offer given the very low market prices of coconut oil in the world market,” he said in a post in his official Facebook page.
Piñol said the DA is ready to extend loans to organized coconut farmers’ group which they could use to buy the crop of their members and trucks to haul the copra to oil mills.
He added that the agency also offered a maximum loan of P50,000 under the Production Loan Easy Access for coconut farmers which they can use in starting livelihood activities that will tide them over while the buying price of copra is low.
Piñol said the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) has already been directed to identify and validate all coconut farmers associations and cooperatives to facilitate the granting of the loans.
Earlier, House Minority Leader Danilo E. Suarez of Quezon said the average farmgate price of copra is now at P15 per kg, compared to the P30 per kg to P40 per kg recorded in previous years.
CIIF-OMG has copra buying stations that are set up in locations near coconut farmers and local dealers.
Its operating plants have a combined annual crushing capacity of 370,000 metric tons of copra with a refining capacity of 240,000 MT of different grades of processed coconut oils. The oil mills’ total crushing capacity accounts for about 10 percent of the country’s coconut oil milling industry.
Established in the 1970s, the CIIF-OMG is a conglomerate of strategically located oil mills and refineries in the Philippines. It operates four coconut oil mills all over the country.
The DA had warned that “heartless” traders who failed to raise their copra buying price will not be able to enjoy the benefits of a business deal that will expand exporters’ access to the Eastern European market.
Piñol made the pronouncement after he and officials of CIIF-OMG and the PCA met with Monaco-based Russian businessman, Igor Malyshkov. He said Malyshkov has firmed up a supply agreement with CIIF-OMG in a meeting arranged by the DA.
The Russian businessman’s Austria-registered Arteks Generation, he said, has links with a supermarket chain in Eastern Europe that has 15,000 outlets.
Piñol said many of the traders did not heed his appeal to raise their buying price in November. He issued the appeal after farmers stopped harvesting copra when its average mill-gate price fell to as low as P15 per kg.
Image credits: Philippine Coconut Authority
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