Baguio City, Sept. 1 (Late Post) – After two successful and blockbuster MinDA Fruits Festival on Session Road for two weekends, Mindanao fruits will now be sold by Baguio City vendors in the public market and stores.
The Mindanao Development Authority (MinDA) initiated Fruits Festival has effectively forged a direct link between fruit farmers in Mindanao and Baguio City vendors who have agreed to sell the fruits at a lower price.
This market link now assures farmers of a ready market for their produce which I believe would encourage them to produce more while consumers could now buy fresh fruits at P50 to P60 less than the previous price levels.
MinDA now is in the process of establishing a database for all fruit farmers in Mindanao, including Sulu and Tawitawi so that future fruit selling activities would be guided by the availability of fruits, the variety and what time of the year would the fruits be ready to be sold in the market.
By geotagging and identifying the location of the fruit production areas in Mindanao, the needed infrastructure support could be provided by national government agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Trade and Industry.
As soon as the accurate database is established, MinDA could explore additional markets for fruits from Mindanao, including other commodities like Tuna, fresh fish, crabs and even upland organic rice.
There are lessons to be learned from this experience:
1. The Philippines is a huge market of over 100-million consumers and there is really a need to satisfy the local market first before exploring markets overseas, especially for fruits and seafood. In the Baguio City MinDA Fruit Festival, for example, 22 tons of fruits on the first Sunday and 58 tons last Sept. 1 and 2 were literally gobbled up by excited consumers in just a few hours.
2. The limiting factor in the direct linkage between the farmers and the consumers is the lack of organisation on the part of the farmers and the vendors who both rely on multiple tiers of traders and middlemen. In Baguio City, for example, MinDA found out that the fruits being sold in the city come from Mindanao via Divisoria in Manila and this jacks up the price of fruits four to five times the farm gate price.
3. The high cost of transport of goods from the South to the North and vice versa stands in the way of effective trading and dampens the spirit of the farmers to produce more. In the case of the MinDA Fruit Festival, I actually invited the airline companies to give priority to Mindanao agri products and offer a lower freight cost as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility. I found out, for example, that airline companies offer cargo forwarders lower freight charges than independent shippers.
4. The absence of basic infrastructure facilities like farm-to-market roads and cold storage facilities affect the productivity and the profitability of farmers’ and fishermen’s activities. I have long batted for a one-time-big-time effort to complete the network of about 12,000-kilometers of FMRs leading to the production areas in the countryside which would cost the country about P160-B, just P20-B higher than the annual dole-out for the 4Ps program. The construction of roads opening up food production areas, especially in Mindanao, would certainly render more useful the wide 6-lane highways constructed under the Build, Build, Build Program of the national government.
I am sharing these lessons with the followers of this page and our policy makers hoping that future programs and undertakings by government would be based on actual inputs from the field and the ground.
(Photos of Davao Durian being sold in the Baguio market for only P100 is proof of the success of the linkage established by the Mindanao Development Authority between Mindanao fruit farmers and consumers in the North. Other photos show truck loads of Durian and Pomelo arriving in Baguio City Sept. 2. Another photo shows a North Cotabato pomelo farmer loading his fruits in a kuliglig to be shipped to Baguio City. There is now an air of excitement among fruit farmers in Mindanao especially with the expansion of the Fruit Festival to other major cities in the country.)
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