Govt plans military lands’ conversion into farms

From Malaya Business Insight (Jan 9): Govt plans military lands’ conversion into farms

The Department of Agriculture (DA) and the Department of National Defense are working on a plan to convert portions of military reservation areas into farms.

Emmanuel Piñol, DA secretary,said he and Delfin Lorenzana, DND secretary, agreed to conduct an inventory of military land nationwide and that the  two agencies will work on a memorandum of agreement to make use of the idle lands.

“In Catanduanes, I was sitting beside Delfin Lorenzana and AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) chief of staff, General (Eduardo) Año. We discussed  our  idea of developing military reservation areas into agricultural production areas.  I asked him (Lorenzana) if he would like to see soldier-farmers. He loves the idea,” Piñol said.

 He said that Lorenzana agreed the idea could work since for example, Fort Magsaysay alone has  46,000 hectares. 

“Sec. Lorenzana said they can supply soldiers with the rice (that they) produce. On our end in DA, if they can produce rice sufficient for the armed forces, that’s one sector of society that will no longer be dependent on our farmers,” Piñol said.

 Aside from this plan, DA is also seekingP900 million funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency for the mechanization of 10,000 hectares pilot rice farms to be presented during Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to the Philippines later this month.

 Piñol said the Agricultural Modernization Program aims to provide farmers in 10 model sites nationwide with farm equipment that include grains dryer, post-harvest facilities, technical support and institutional development.

 “Equipment will be managed by effective cooperatives which will be leased to farmers. If the scheme would be successful, benchmarks would increase in productivity and decrease in post-harvest losses since at present, we lose 16 percent of crops post-harvest,” he explained.

DA also said the program intends to have model sites with clusters of rice farms totaling 1,000 hectares per area.

 “Unless we mechanize, we cannot (be at par with other countries.) Even with the cost of production, it remains high since we are not yet mechanized. We are hopeful that it gets implemented this year,” Piñol said.

At present, the average production cost of rice farmers is P12.41 per kilo of rice produced, while farm modernization rate is only close to 3 horsepower per hectare.

 Latest data from the Philippine Statistics Authority showed the country produced 18,149,837.78 metric tons (MT) of rice in 2015, four percent lower than 2014’s 18,967,826.17 MT.

Areas harvested with rice also went down by 1.8 percent in 2015 to 4,656,227.14 hectares from 4,739,672.16 hectares in 2014.

http://www.malaya.com.ph/business-news/business/govt-plans-military-lands%E2%80%99-conversion-farms