Coco levy fund eyed for replanting program

The Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) should be more aggressive in tapping the income from the estimated P50-billion coconut levy fund for the massive rehabilitation program for the country’s aging coconut farms.

Sen. Edgardo Angara, a former Secretary of the Department of Agriculture (DA), said in a recent budget hearing that a mammoth replanting and fertilization program for senile coconut trees is critical to the country’s efforts to fortify its position as the world’s biggest exporter of coconut oil and as the leading exporter of value-added products such as coco biodiesel, coco-fiber and virgin coconut oil (VCO)

"The Philippines is missing the awesome opportunity to sell more of these products especially with the growing global demand because of the prostrate status of the coconut industry," Angara said.

He said that for the country to meet a substantial portion of the global demand, the PCA should push through with its medium-term plan to replant 1.5 million hectares of coconut farms.

Angara noted that all the parties involved in the levy issue — from the government to the private personalities — had agreed to release P1 billion from the income of the levy.

Coconut farmers’ groups are pinning their hopes on the coco levy to help them rehabilitate their coconut farms which are suffering from low productivity as a result of inadequate fertilization and aging coconut trees.

"The DA should push hard to get funding for the replanting program from the coconut levy. In a global market that is desperately searching for fuel alternatives, coco-based biodiesel is a prized commodity but local production is a meager 70,000 liters annually. The local production cannot even produce the 70 million liters needed yearly to be a viable additive to petro-diesel in the domestic market," said Angara.

On the other hand, there is a huge demand for coco-fiber in China and other countries which have found coco-fiber as a vital component of their desertification and flood control work. Moreover, VCO is both popular in the domestic and in international wellness market because of its nutritional and therapeutic properties.

Last year, the PCA proposed a five-year, P2.5-billion coconut rehabilitation program for 800,000 hectares of low-yielding coconut farms nationwide.

The plan called for replanting of old coconut trees in 150,000 hectares annually. This will cost P500 million a year and will also include tapping the local government units, especially in major coconut-producing regions, to raise counterpart funds to undertake the fertilization of coconut lands.

The PCA earlier warned that the local coconut industry faces supply problems in the next two to three years unless government steps up plans to rehabilitate and fertilize old coconut trees.

The PCA’s research and development extension branch previously noted that there are no follow-through programs after the World Bank-assisted Small Coconut Farms Development Project ended in 1998.

It said that without any fertilization of trees in the country, by 2010, only 2.216 million metric tons (MT) of copra could be expected. On the other hand, a rehabilitation program through replanting and fertilization of 800,000 hectares at a five-year cycle could increase the national production level to at least 3.5 million MT.

Currently, only 350,000 hectares of rehabilitated farms are contributing to yields of 1.25 MT of copra per hectare per year to the supply of coconuts in the country.

The remaining 2.75 million hectares of coconut areas are only yielding about 0.70 MT of copra per hectare annually, largely due to the widespread nutrient deficiencies in nitrogen, potassium, chloride, sulfur and boron.

Moreover, senility resulting to marginal yields, about 10 to 15 percent of existing crop, is also contributing to the continuous decline in productivity of coconuts in all major coconut producing areas.