The government urged the Fertilizer and Pesticide Authority (FPA) to continue enhancing its services and initiate appropriate changes for the benefit of farmers, a Department of Agriculture (DA) official said.
“You must keep up with your mandate to help the agriculture sector…obtain adequate supplies of fertilizers, pesticides, and other inputs; enforce the highest quality control standards for both fertilizer and pesticides, and other agricultural chemicals,” DA Senior Undersecretary Domingo Panganiban said.
“And also provide farmers with the technical capacity and the capital they need to produce their own organic fertilizer through the implementation of the Fortified Organic Fertilizer Development Program; and educate both the industry and the country’s farmers on the safe and judicious use of [the] farm input,” he said during the FPA 46th founding anniversary recently.
Moreover, Panganiban said that even before the President (Ferdinand Marcos Jr.) took office, he organized a group of economists to study the issues affecting the country’s food security, particularly those related to increasing the country’s rice harvest.
He said the FPA should work with DA and its attached agencies in providing relief to farmers who are confronted with high production costs.
Panganiban added that the department’s collective effort last year led to the 19.76 million metric ton-palay production record, which exceeded the yield between 2000 and 2020 year-on-year.
“The DA distributed 7.7 million kilograms of fertilizer last year, along with 2,500 gallons of pesticides and a billion pesos in fertilizer discount vouchers,” he said.
Furthermore, the DA official said the interventions provided essential farm inputs for the enterprises of 1.8 million farmers and 14,000 farmers’ cooperatives.
Panganiban also congratulated the men and women of the FPA for improving the quality of life of Filipinos through increased farm incomes, productivity and food production using safe and appropriate fertilizer and pesticide inputs for the past 46 years.
