The amount of money that will be taken from the Philippine Rural Development Project (PRDP), the largest World Bank-funded project in the country, in order to support various agriculture enterprises in Mindanao is now at nearly P629 million.

In a statement, the Department of Agriculture (DA) said that PRDP’s enterprise development component in Mindanao now covers a total of 108 approved subprojects worth P628.56 million.

To be specific, the Investment in Rural Enterprise and Agriculture and Fisheries Productivity (I-REAP) component of PRDP provides support and various interventions to different Proponent Groups (PGs) or eligible cooperatives from targeted project areas based on Commodity Investment Plan (CIP) for each province.

Right now, there are already a total of 54 I-REAP subprojects worth P84.86 million under the micro-enterprise category in Mindanao. It covers 54 proponent groups and 5,098 beneficiaries.
For small enterprises, there are 40 subprojects worth P310.47 million distributed to 97 proponent groups and 10,203 beneficiaries.

Lastly, there are 14 subprojects for medium enterprise worth P233.23 million with 54 proponent groups, and 12,201 beneficiaries.

Most of these subprojects included the provision of financial assistance such as working capital to help proponent groups expand their operations, DA said.

Project beneficiaries also received technical assistance such as Emergency Operations Manual (EOM), business plan review, skills training, market linkage, and credit facilitation.

PRDP also provides input provisions and infrastructure support to these proponent groups through the establishment of warehouses, solar and mechanical dryers, fermenting facilities, and other infrastructure components that is needed in the production and processing.

DA said the use of PRDP tools such as geotagging and online conferences aided in the fast-tracking of projects in order for the project recipients to enjoy the benefits as soon as possible.

In September, PRDP National Deputy Project Director Shandy Hubilla said the DA is now seeking the approval of the National Economic and Development Authority-Investment Coordination Committee (NEDA-ICC) for the P14-billion extension of PRDP.

She said that even if the PRDP already had additional financing last year, the DA still made another request for the program’s extension and another funding worth US$280 million.

Launched in 2013, PRDP began as a farm-to-market road (FMR) initiative of DA until it was eventually expanded to cover several livelihood components meant to improve the lives of agriculture workers in the country.

It originally had a budget of US$500 million or P27 billion.

The five-year project was supposed to end last year, but the DA managed to ask for an extension from the World Bank and secured an additional budget of more than US$100 million. 

Because of this extension, PRDP will now last until 2022, though the DA is hoping that the project can last further up to 2024.