Presidential Assistant for Mindanao Jesus Dureza and Growth With Equity in Mindanao (GEM) Program Chief of Party Dr. Charles Feibel told participants at the recently-held 5th Mindanao Food Congress at the Apo View Hotel that there is a big market in the BIMP-EAGA that Mindanao tends to overlook.
Dureza said Mindanao can take advantage of recent developments such as the adoption of a clustering strategy on marketing EAGA products and services in the prospective foreign markets to promote Mindanao food products.
He said the growth area is currently mounting efforts to establish business relations with external markets such as China, India, Australia, Korea and Japan and conduct EAGA business missions to the capital states of the region to market the competitive products and services of agriculture, fishery, minerals and tourism sectors.
He said EAGA-member countries now offer bright prospects for Mindanao food sector as a result of joint government and private sector BIMP-EAGA initiative.
Brunei Darussalam, for instance, is known to be a large importer of food products with agricultural activities centered on the production of broiler chickens, table eggs and horticulture.
Indonesia’s focus, on the other hand, is on the development of rural infrastructure, production, trade of food products and dissemination of technologies for food production and processing.
Malaysia’s bustling cross-border trading will also ease food trade linkage with Mindanao. Its task force on bilateral ventures is now identifying projects that can be jointly initiated by any business stakeholders in BIMP-EAGA. Among the projects being looked at are large-scale farming, plantations and food processing.
Meanwhile, the GEM Program stressed that given the increased productivity and competitiveness, Mindanao is not far from becoming the food basket of Asia.
Dr. Feibel cited Mindanao’s evident strength in tuna and marine products, fruits and vegetables, seaweeds, livestock and other natural resources. But all these, he said, still need a strong government support in providing infrastructure and policy reforms to further growth.