The Department of Agriculture is now in the mid-term implementation of the six-year Philippine Rural Development Project made possible with a P27.54Billion funding loaned from the World Bank.
“It is a critical period for the project because it’s loaned from the World Bank and usually at mid-term we re-evaluate the performance of the project,” said Sherwin B. Manual, information unit head of the PRDP on Wednesday.
He said the implementers are now concerned on the disbursement of the project as well as the numbers of completed projects in all project areas.
The project has achieved a total of 171 infrastructure projects amounting to P79 Million pesos.
A total of 31 sub projects are already completed across Mindanao majority of which are located in the Region XII and comprised of farm to market road projects. At least 69 Projects are still ongoing while 13 projects are about to start within this month including 15 newly-approved sub projects. The PRDP is also working on the additional budget from the World Bank for the other project proposals. “We actually cornered 43% of the Philippine budget for infrastructure, the infrastructure component is called I-BUILD,” said Manual. The component called Intensified Building Up of Infrastructure and Logistics for Development (I-Build) aims to put in place strategic and climate resilient rural infrastructure facilities along the value chain.
Based on the agreement of the PRDP with World Bank, the project aimed to achieve four development objectives: First, 5 percent increase of farmer’s income every year. Second, 7 percent increase in the value of the marketed output. Third, at least 20 percent increase in the number of farmers and fisher folks who have access to DA services.
The fourth is an expected 30 percent increase in the incomes of the targeted beneficiaries of those who are directly involved with the enterprise development. “We measure that right after the completion of the enterprise project of the farmers,” said Manual.
Enterprise development the PRDP has a component called Investments in Rural Enterprise and Agriculture and Fisheries Productivity or I-REAP. Under this component there are 73 approved enterprise projects, 43 of this are approved subprojects with a budget of 184.2 Million pesos. As of today there are eight projects that are currently implemented. “Our partner for this is the Local Government Unit,” Manual said. The LGU can still pass business proposals for this component because there is still 200 million pesos budget.
In the third year of implementation the PRDP are planning to mainstream those innovative practices that originated in the PRDP and incorporate them into the DA’s regular system and in the Local Government Unit Practices. Some of these innovations are the use of provincial commodity investment plan, National Agriculture map and the regional Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Plan (AFMP).
In Davao the champion commodity is the Cacao, the PRDP also focuses on commodity products such as coffee, banana specially the Cardava variety, seaweeds, mangos. In Mindanao, there are a total of 21 commodities. The farmers of these commodities are consolidated to maximize their income. There should be a minimum of 15 members in an association of farmers for them to pass a project proposal to the DA. In order to assure that the farmers will be able to handle a big amount of money, the PRDP looks for association who has three years fully audited financial documents. The project proposal gone through value chain analysis (VCA), in order to assure that there is market for these commodities.
