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ILOILO City: The Department of Agriculture-Bureau of
Plant Industry (DA-BPI) is considering strengthening the country’s
mango industry in the global market.
Dr. Hernani Golez, chief of the
National Mango Research and Development Center (NMRDC), said that
there are three factors affecting the country’s mango industry in
improving its sales overseas, particularly in the United States.
The NMRDC is under the DA-BPI.
“Mango production [in the
Philippines] could not meet the export demands because harvest is
seasonal. We have low-quality control of the yield. And, we could
not meet the quarantine requirement of other countries,” Golez
said in a press conference last week at the Grand Hotel.
The BPI held a seminar on the use
of irradiation for quarantine measures on mango to meet the
requirements of export products. Presently, only the Philippine
Nuclear Research Institute (PNRI) has irradiation processes to
prevent the spread of diseases on food exports, Golez said.
He said the BPI received a
$2.02-million grant from the United Sates Department of Agriculture
(USDA) to conduct a study to enhance the competitiveness of the
Philippine-produced mango in the global market.
The grant is for the study of
irradiation for quarantine measures, as well as for conducting a
national survey on the presence of insects and pests threatening the
mango harvest. Likewise, it will be used for comprehensive
commercialization and promotion strategies for irradiated products,
and using quarantine as an implementing agent for irradiation
measures.
The survey seeks to determine if
mango produced in the countryside, particularly the Visayas region,
are free of mango pulp and seed weevil.
He said that the survey would
cover 5 percent of the entire number of all mango fruit bearing
trees in order to determine the presence of the pests.
“It would surely create a great
impact if they are all qualified [pest-free] to enter the US
market,” Golez said.
According to Golez, the
Philippines yield of 984,000 metric tons of mango annually but only
6.2 percent of the harvest is sold to other countries. With the
USDA-funded research, Golez hopes to increase the mango export
industry from 16 percent to 20 percent by 2010 and double the
figures by 2015.
--Panay News
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