Cotabato City—A Soil Mapping Database and simplified credit window facilities would give the government’s economic reform agenda a hard push from the agriculture sector, the country’s top agriculturist said Wednesday.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said soil mapping would help Philippine farmers determine which crops could be grown best in what types of soil in agricultural areas of the country’s 77 provinces.
Piñol, a journalist-turned-agriculturist, said the soil mapping database of the Department of Agriculture included other important statistics, such as those directly relevant to the communities’ poverty incidence.
The Philippines has 9.671 million hectares of total agricultural areas.
Of which, 4.225 million hectares constitute the aggregate actual permanent cropland, from a total 4.936 million hectares of arable land, according to DA’s Philippine Agriculture in Figures-Country STAT Philippines.
“The soil mapping database will also help the farmers determine the kind of soil nutrients they would need to improve their cropping,” Piñol said.
Piñol said local poverty incidence figures were useful information in the package of the Soil Mapping Database, as principal factor in plotting development initiatives affecting farmers and fishers and the families directly dependent on their production.
The DA programs, he said, were also designed to minimize the trading gap between the farmers and fishers on one side, and the marketing of their products on the other hand.
The Agriculture chief said that to be able to address inflation, as a perceived outcome of the TRAIN (Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion) Law, the agriculture sector would have to embrace innovative approaches in development, and adopt programs directly beneficial to farmers and fishers—which include simplified schemes on lending window facilities.
The DA and its partner institutions in the banking industry have devised loan programs of up to P5 million for organized fishers with minimum interest rate; and from P50,000 up to P3 million for organized farmers in terms of farm machineries and post-harvest facilities.
For instance, Piñol said, an organized group of shoreline community fishers could avail themselves of a loan program to acquire a fishing boat worth P5 million in approximate total cost of boat building and the price tags of motor engine, and fishing implements.
He said the DA had tapped young people to help barely schooled fishers and farmers in processing documents at specifically designated areas, where they could file their loan application.
