THE Department of Agriculture (DA), through the National Organic Agriculture Program (NOAP), is pushing for a bigger budget for organic agriculture in the coming years to further boost the industry.
Grace Docuyanan-Moore, deputy program coordinator of NOAP, said the government is currently working on a P600-million allocation for the implementation of organic agriculture programs.
Docuyanan-Moore, who visited this city for the ongoing 11th Negros Island Organic Farmers Festival (NIOFF), said in a statement Thursday that for 2017, the budget will increase to about P800 million, with Negros Island Region (NIR) getting a P7-million share.
“We aim to increase the budget to P1 billion by 2018 in order to design better projects that will address the needs of the organic agriculture sector,” the NOAP official said, adding that there is a need to uplift the industry so that it will have a significant share in the gross domestic product (GDP).
Aside from sustaining the sector’s strength in the local market, NOAP aims to also excel internationally given the country’s huge potential particularly in terms of areas devoted to organic.
Docuyanan-Moore said that with Negros’s excellent performance and being the national government’s strongest partner in the implementation of development programs, the NIR will surely get the biggest chunk of the country’s budget for organic agriculture in the coming years.
DA-NIR is currently operating with a P5-million budget intended for organic agriculture programs, which was allocated based on a proposal-scheme.
Docuyanan-Moore said the allocation is still small thus, there is a need to review and determine the appropriate projects and interventions for the region.
“Negros has been into organic for a long time, maybe it needs to enter a different level which entails a bigger budget,” she added.
The NOAP official further said that the Organic Agriculture Board is also in the process of revising the budgeting system.
“It will no longer be proposal-based like that of other banner programs of DA thus, we can really expect bigger budget in the future,” Docuyanan-Moore added. (EPN with reports from PNA)