By Aurelio A. Pena
Looking closely at the lush green leaves of the small, growing cacao seedling was enough to convince Rene Dalayon that the sprawling two-hectare cacao seedling farm here in this small town of Asuncion, was ready to supply the needs of thousands of banana farmers who want to plant cacao between the rows of their banana plants.
“Looks good—they all look healthy and ready for distribution to our fellow banana farmers here in Davao del Norte who want to join us in the inter-cropping of banana plants with cacao,” Dalayon broke into a smile, as he passed the cacao seedling to his plant technicians for further inspection.
Dalayon, who heads the Federation of Banana Cooperatives or FEDCO as its chief executive officer, said they had been looking for ways to help banana farmers cope with two big crisis that had almost devastated their banana farms— the China crisis, which banned Philippines bananas from the Mainland due to quarantine problems and the spreading danger of a banana disease called Panama Wilt which had already damaged thousands of hectares of banana plantations.
“We saw the great potential of cacao and what it can do to help uplift the lives of our farmers and other stakeholders in the banana industry,” Dalayon said, looking across the thousands of cacao seedlings growing robust under the fishnet serving as a protective filter from the blistering heat of the sun.
Just over the weekend, Dalayon and his FEDCO executive staff sat down with officials of the ACDI-VOCA to sign another grant agreement of P3.2 million to set into motion the Cacao Banana Agri-Enterprise Development (CBAED) involving over 2,000 farmers in selected towns and villages of Davao del Norte province.
ACDI-VOCA is an international non- profit organization setting up the CococoPal Farming System project in Mindanao, with funds coming from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
This project, according to Nicholas Richards, chief of party in the Philippines, is to work closely with small farmers and small agri-companies as well as government agencies, local governments and agriculture schools in Mindanao.
A CBAED center, according to Richards, has five parts— training, demo farms, post harvest processing, organic fertilizer and cacao seedling production and distribution. This center, put up by FEDCO, will have a cacao nursery, organic input facility, demo farm showing bananas growing together with cacao, and a post-harvest facility.
Farmer leaders had been trained in mid-September on farm planning, farm decision-making, farming as a business, and technical training on cacao production.
“All these years we’ve always stick to just one goal— to help rice farmers, banana farmers, coconut farmers, cacao farmers become more productive to earn more income and produce more food for their families,” Richards said.
Dalayon is one with his FEDCO executive staff in expressing so much optimism on the future growth of a new emerging cacao industry in the Davao region over the coming years.
“We see this cacao industry as a new ray of hope for all our banana farmers who had been suffering all these years from low buying prices and
millions in unpaid debts. This time around, they can finally stand up and face a brighter future,” Dalayon said. [Philpress Features]
