Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said state-owned Land Bank of the Philippines started implementing a Japan-funded $40 million project that aims to jumpstart agribusiness investments and raise farmers’ incomes in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.
The loan agreement for the program”•the Harnessing Agribusiness Through Robust and Vibrant Entrepreneurship Support of Peaceful Transformation or Harvest”•was signed bu LandBank and Japan International Cooperation Agency on Jan. 12, 2017. It became effective on June 9, 2017.
“The Harvest program which we signed with Jica a few months ago is now ongoing,” Dominguez said at a recent briefing in Malacañang. “The terms [of the loan agreement] are very, very liberal. The interest rates are extremely low so you can almost say they are ‘semi-grants’,” he said.
The Harvest program is included in the list of projects with an indicative total cost P315 billion that the Philippines proposed for financing by Japan during the second meeting of the Philippine-Japan high level joint committee on infrastructure development and economic cooperation held recently in Manila.