A CACAO Industry Development Association of Mindanao, Inc (Cidami) official pushes for cacao farmer training first before cacao seedlings distribution as a solution to the growing demand of cacaos in the domestic and international market.
Cidami executive director Valente Turtur, during Wednesday's Habi at Kape forum at the Abreeza Ayala Malls, said the target volume of cacao production in 2022 is around 100,000 metric tons nationwide.
Turtur said 80 percent of cacao farmers in the Philippines are small-time holders and could not even finance their own seedlings.
Last year, the Department of Agriculture (DA) assisted these farmers by giving away 12 million to 15 million seedlings nationwide. The same project was also done a few years before that.
He said due to lack of training before the distribution, most of these seedlings were not taken cared of properly.
“Only 50 percent of these distributed seedlings survived,” Turtur said.
Currently, there are 28,000 hectares of land are already developed for cacao production, lesser than the 100,000 hectare target.
Turtur also said the total seedlings distributed, if properly taken care of, would have had covered a total of about 15,000 hectares of land or equivalent to 30,000 metric tons of cacaos produced.
But since the distribution of seedlings, which started a few years ago, there were no significant changes yet with the production volume as produced by these distributed seedlings.
He said the DA-Davao Region had started with training cacao farmers before seedling distribution and he hopes that the same would also be done in other regions in the country.
Turtur added they first wanted to focus more on the quality development of the cacao beans in the region since it was difficult to keep up with the 100,000 metric tons target. But he said, "Even if we produce high quality cacao beans that encourage foreign investors to invest, if we could not keep up with their required volume for export, the investors might just look for other producers who can produce more."
Philippine cacaos and chocolates are primarily exported to United States of America (USA) and some parts of Europe.
Turtur said exporting to nearer countries like China and Japan is possible once the production volume is sufficient.
In 2016, Davao Region was able to produce 12,000 metric tons of cacao, much lesser than the target of 14,000 metric tons due to the drought experienced by the region during the first quarter of the year.
To keep up with the increasing demand, the Philippines imports 20,000 to 25, 000 metric tons of cacao beans from Vietnam and Indonesia. Cidami targets that within five years, the Philippines would no longer need to import from these countries. (JPA)