Saturday, August 23, 2008 RP's Otop project creates 246-T jobs
THE Philippine-wide operations of "One Town One Product" (Otop) have generated so far 246,420 jobs for Filipinos since it started in 2004, according to Trade Undersecretary Merly Cruz.
Cruz said the Otop concept of small business production is job-intensive and putting it into action by small and medium enterprises (SME) usually requires more workers as the business starts to grow.
It's natural for the entrepreneur to hire more people to help produce more products as the business grows," Cruz said.
Otop was adopted from the Japanese concept of "One Village One Product" or Ovop founded in the Kyushu prefecture of Oita, Japan, some 20 years ago by Dr. Morihiko Hiramatsu.
The Ovop is basically a way of coming up with a product or service within a town or community that the people do best using only local resources.
This product is then improved, developed, and packaged very well with a brand name and finally link it up with the market, according to Cruz.
As a good example, Cruz cited the success of SME Ruben See who started a small snack food manufacturing way back in 1996. When Ruben started making his now-famous "Gold Chips" banana chips, all he had then was a big crude cooking pot called "kawa" to cook cardaba bananas and turn them into chips.
Now with the training, technical support, funding sources and market access provided under the Otop Philippines program, Ruben's company See's International is now exporting banana chips to many countries all over the world.
From just around five workers, Ruben's factories in Manila and Davao now employ over 300 workers producing 50 to 60 metric tons of banana chips daily -- making him one of the largest banana chips exporters in the Philippines.
Cruz said the Otop program under the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is targeting total jobs of almost 700,000 jobs for jobless Filipinos by the year 2010.
