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By Ira Karen Apanay, Reporter
THE Philippines is one of the new
48 countries that will be covered by a series of projects of the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, with
a total funding of $21 million, to help small farmers and vulnerable
households mitigate the negative effects of rising food and farm
input prices.
FAO said the projects aims to
provide farmers with agricultural inputs this month and for an
expected duration of one year.
The projects will be funded by
the Technical Cooperation Program of FAO and is part of its
initiative on soaring food prices.
Six countries namely Burkina
Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal
are already benefiting from the projects for a total funding of
nearly $2.8 million.
In a statement, FAO said its own
funding under the initiative now covers 54 countries.
Among the 48 other countries
included in the program are Afghanistan, Angola, Armenia,
Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Burundi, Cambodia,
Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic
Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Eritrea, Grenada, Guinée,
Guinée-Bissau, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Kenya,
Kyrgyzstan and North Korea.
FAO said the immediate objective
of the projects is to ensure the success of the next planting
seasons and, in the longer term, demonstrate that by increasing the
supply of key agricultural inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers,
small farmers will be able to rapidly increase their food
production.
“Increased food production
would help cushion small farmers, who often have to buy part of
their food from markets with rising food prices and would,
hopefully, lead to a surplus production,” FAO said.
It further stated that the
provision of seeds, fertilizers and other agricultural inputs to
small farmers is intended to encourage donors, financial
institutions and national governments to support the provision of
farm inputs on a much larger scale.
The unprecedented hike in food
prices, which rose 52 percent between 2007 and 2008, has severe
economic, social and political consequences in poor countries.
Likewise, the high prices of agricultural inputs have become a major
obstacle to developing countries’ efforts to increase agricultural
production, FAO said.
Govt optimistic
on ‘palay’ targets
Agriculture officials expressed
hopes that the palay (unhusked rice) production target of 17.32
million metric tons (MTs) for 2008 can still be achieved despite
Typhoon Frank’s crop damages.
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap
said officials of his agency believe they can also hit their
original target of 10 million-plus MTs of palay for the wet or main
cropping season, despite the typhoon’s damages, on the condition
that they can quickly implement the proposed farm rehabilitation
program to offset production losses in the affected areas of Western
Visayas and 11 other regions.
The production target of 17.32
million MTs is 6.67-percent higher than last year’s record yield
of 16.24 million MTs.
Latest reports from the
Department of Agriculture Rice Action Center, headed by
Undersecretary Jesus Emmanuel Paras, showed that farmers have
already reaped 7.3 million MTs, or 200,000 MTs more than the
7.1-million MT target, for the dry or summer crop from 1.79-million
hectares of rice lands, Yap said.
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