Gov't to put up 'grains highway'
The Arroyo administration is setting up a national "grains highway" that will directly link rice and corn production areas to major consumption centers as well as calamity and isolation-prone sites, as part of long-term measures to create more jobs in the countryside, increase the profitability of farmers and fisherfolk, and make food plentiful at affordable prices for low-income Filipino families.
Secretary Arthur Yap of the Department of Agriculture (DA) said the National Food Authority (NFA) Council will put in place "the first 30% of the grains highway program" this year with the Bureau of Post Harvest, Research and Extension.
Yap told a press briefing that the NFA will upgrade its warehouses, put up grains silos and other inter-related postharvest facilities and marketing support systems that are meant to reduce crop wastages and losses, and expand the access of small farmers and fisherfolk to more markets for their produce.
"These facilities that will form part of the grains highway will be set up in the 37 rice-producing and 33 corn-producing provinces of the country," Yap said. "We will likewise encourage farmers' cooperatives and other agricultural stakeholders to help bankroll and build their own silos, which is a key factor in reducing post-harvest losses and boosting farm productivity."
He noted that postharvest losses for corn alone reach up to 25% of the total harvests in some cases, owing to the lack of adequate drying and storage facilities.
The grains highway, Yap said, will actually be a logistics artery aimed at efficiently storing, processing, and transporting food from production to consumption areas.
With this grains highway in place, Yap said the NFA can handle other commodities besides rice and corn, to include high value crops and meat and poultry products to generate more revenues and create new jobs.
Yap said the development of the grains highway will address pressing concerns over the inadequacy of postharvest facilities for farm produce, which has spawned inefficient practices leading to high production losses by as much as 14.8% for rice and 20.6% for fruits and vegetable harvests.
A grain highway will also do away with inefficient, costly and slow transport systems to move agricultural products from production areas to selling centers, and to resolve the problem of unstable food supply and prices in "unchartered" areas and food-deficient communities, Yap said.
Besides building silos and warehouses, he said the grains highway will include the construction of cold storage facilities, dust control systems; the purchase of dump trucks, rice mills, truck scales; stack conveyors, generators, dehullers; and the repair of packaging machines and flatbed and mechanical dryers.
These facilities will be put in place in various strategic points in Central Luzon, Metro Manila, Cagayan Valley, Bicol, Central Visayas, Central Mindanao and other parts of Mindanao.