by Aurelio Pena
FARMERS HERE are beginning to realize that it’s not a good idea to depend only on one crop as a means of livelihood. Many of them have realized this after depending only on bananas to keep them alive all these years.
Now, instead of depending only on growing bananas for export, many Davao farmers are seriously thinking of hedging their bets on a number of crops for export that can be planted between their rows of Cavendish bananas.
One farmers’ cooperative, probably the country’s largest, has already started the groundwork for massive planting of palm oil trees and cocoa trees to hedge against losses in the banana growing business.
Rene Dalayon, chief executive officer of the Federation of Farmers’ Cooperatives in Mindanao (FEDCO) said they don’t want to be under the mercy of market forces of supply and demand that too often drives the buying prices of Cavendish bananas way below their production costs.
“We want to be in a position where we don’t have to depend too much on our bananas to keep us going as farmers. If we lose money in this crop, we want to have other profitable crops we can turn to,” Dalayon said.
Some of his FEDCO farmer-members are already earning much from other crops like falcatta trees, a commercial tree variety in big demand by paper mills here and abroad. Some are also growing local varieties of bananas like saba, lacatan, tundan, papaya, pineapple, etc— as a hedge against potential losses in growing Cavendish bananas.
But their biggest potential, according to Dalayon, lies in the large scale production of cocoa and palm oil trees which will be the focus of the federation in the coming months.
Dalayon, who was a finalist in the recent Ernst and Young global award as “Entrepreneur of the Year”, told this writer that many of his farmer members are so mired in a sea of debts, they had no other choice to survive but to turn to other high-value crops that will ensure their survival.
This award-winning entrepreneur has a lot to be thankful for, especially to his supporters at the Department of Agriculture regional office, the Department of Trade and Industry, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) —- and lately to the NGO people who promote cocoa production funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
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