The government is investing P100 million to develop vegetable processing in Benguet Province, which produces 80 percent of the country’s demand for vegetables.
This investment is divided into the construction of separate vegetable packaging and processing facilities inside the Benguet Agri-Pinoy Trading Center (BAPTC) and in Benguet State University (BSU), as well as the provision of additional seed capital for BAPTC.
All of these efforts, according to Agriculture Secretary William Dar, should be able to help the farmers avoid the dumping of harvest, which happens due to oversupply and logistical problems.
The vegetable packaging and processing facilities inside BAPTC and BSU will cost P40 million and P20 million to build, respectively.
The two facilities, Department of Agriculture (DA) CAR OIC-Regional Executive Director Cameron Odsey said, should complement each other.
“The rationale of having this food processing facility, we don’t want a repeat of the scenario wherein farmers are forced to throw away their excess yield,” Dar said.
“We still want to convert them to value-added products,” he added.
To be specific, the facility to rise inside BAPTC will have the necessary equipment for packaging and processing.
“The processing facility at BAPTC will focus on the initial processing activities such as washing and trimming while the more complicated processing activities such as juicing is for the BSU processing facility to work on,” Odsey said.
Dar urged the region to use this work-of-the-art packaging facility and promote it for value addition.
Envisioned to function as a corporation, BAPTC was then given a P40 million seed capital to be downloaded to the BSU as its fund manager.
The capital will be used to purchase unsold vegetables that were traded in the Center at the end of the day to prevent possible wastage and income losses, especially to the farmers.