President Marcos Jr. on Tuesday called for the full implementation of the P45- billion Philippine Rural Development Project (PRDP) Scale-Up program which aims to improve and develop the country’s agricultural sector.
The President, in a meeting with officials led by the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the World Bank (WB) in Malacañang, said there is a need to aggressively pursue the PRDP Scale-Up program as it is expected to benefit about 450,000 farmers and fisherfolk and create about 42,000 new jobs
The program is funded through a P33- billion loan from the World Bank. The national government shall provide P5.57 billion as counterpart and the P6.44 billion will be funded by the local government units (LGUs) and farmer and fisherfolk cooperative associations (FCAs).
The World Bank Board is expected to approve the project on June 29, with the loan signing taking place in July. Once the loan is approved, project implementation shall commence in August this year.
The PRDP Scale-Up is an offshoot of the PRDP in 2014 which aims to establish a modern, value chain-oriented, and climate-resilient agriculture and fisheries sector; provide key infrastructure, facilities, technology, enterprises, information, productivity; and enhance competitiveness in the countryside.
The current PRDP Scale-Up aims to build on the gains of the original PRDP to further improve the access of farmers and fisherfolk to markets for increased income.
It includes identifying and setting up of key agri-fishery investment areas; clustering and consolidation of FCAs to attain economies of scale; and enhancing efforts to respond to rural infrastructure demand with farm-to-market roads (FMRs) as one of the priority investments, among others.
Prior to his meeting with the DA and World Bank officials, Marcos also witnessed on Tuesday the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Cooperative Partnership for Agricultural Machinery between the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the Korea Agricultural Machinery Industry Cooperative (KAMICO) for the setting up of a local machinery production in the country.
The President, highlighting the importance of mechanization to agricultural production, said the establishment of such a facility is the first step towards agricultural development and he expects it to result in better yield and lower production cost to make Filipino farmers more competitive in the future.
KAMICO’s initial investment is $30 million for the phase 1 of the project which would be tripled in the second phase.
