DAVAO CITY—The local coconut industry is awaiting the Senate version of how to utilize the coconut-levy fund to narrow the supply gap, and open the sector for more investments currently discouraged by unreliable supply.
Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) Adminstrator Romulo de la Rosa, said the Lower House has passed its version on third reading, practically passing it as the Lower House version, to fund the rehabilitation of the trees and provide scholarships to children of coconut farmers.
He added the only Senate version would complete the process to form the bicameral committee to reconcile the points from both houses of Congress, and then endorse it to President Duterte for approval.
The levy fund is estimated to be around P71 billion, and it has been the subject of petition for release to farmers or the industry. The last mass protest for its release was undertaken in 2014 in a 71-day walk from Davao City to Malacañang.
The fund would be a major saving grace to an industry currently hounded by severe lack of production to meet industry demand. Owners of oil mills, processors and desiccating plants in Mindanao alone estimated the lack of supply to be 3 million metric tons (MMT), as processors diversify operation to derive new products from coconut meat and other parts of the nuts and the tree.
De la Rosa said government spending was only P1.5 billion annually, a fund that could hardly cope with replanting needs to narrow down the gap. There was already a backlog of 20 million trees in 2012.
The PCA and the Philippine Statistics Authority said there were 329.9 million coconut trees as of 2015, that produced an average of 14.902 billion nuts in the last three years.
De la Rosa added that productivity per tree remained very low at only 47 nuts on the average, and the optimal productivity could reach as many as 200 nuts.
The PCA and PSA data also indicated the industry has been producing an average of 2.258 MMT of copra, an equivalent of extracting the meat from 14.735 MMT in nut equivalent.
The Philippines derived $877 million in export earnings from coconuts in 2015.
However, even the oil mills have been suffering from severe lack of copra supply, de la Rosa said, “where before it enjoyed the patronage of coconut farmers who commonly sell coconuts in the form of copra.”
“With companies in fierce competition for supply, farmers now sell their produce in whole nuts,” he added.
He said the fruit of the replanting would be seen only in the next three years, at the shortest “and in the immediate term, the best solution would be fertilization” to reach productivity level at 200 nuts per tree.
The most common practice also was applying salt to the soil but even the government has been unable to fully subsidize farmers. De la Rosa added the current assistance in supplying salt has covered only 10 percent of target, or an area equivalent to 300,000 hectares.
Coconut lands are about 3.517 million hectares spread in 68 out of 81 provinces.