Tuesday, December 23, 2008 500 stakeholders to join veggie summit By Joy Romares-Sevilla
SOME 500 producers, traders and buyers from the vegetable industry are expected to gather early next year for the first National Vegetable Marketing Summit, which will be hosted by Davao City.
In an interview, Roger Gualberto, former chair of the Vegetable Council in Southern Mindanao, told Sun.Star Davao that the summit will be one of the major events of the council for 2009.
"This will be the first summit we will have that will be participated by all producers and buyers of vegetables nationwide," Gualberto said.
"We also expect the participation of service providers such as shipment agencies, cold storage facility companies, and others."
Gualberto said the event will try to address issues and concerns in the vegetable industry, including the deficiency of stakeholders to meet the required level of demand and production in the local market.
"This will be a convergence of ideas by the service providers, buyers, and producers. We will let the farmers talk about their capacities, why they can't sell their produce to the buyers, and at the same time, buyers too will lay down their reasons why they can't buy the farmers' produce.
The service providers, on the other hand, will try to extend some help to possibly settle terms of vegetable trading," Gualberto said.
At the end of the summit, he disclosed that they will try to ink partnership through a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between the participating stakeholders to further improve the industry's needs.
Gualberto sees the staging of the summit as a measure to strengthen the vegetable industry in the countryside.
"Next year, we want to focus more on marketing. We will try to advocate more on this to help our farmers sell their produce (because some of them have the difficulty to find the market)," Gualberto said.
