At present, the country is third only after China and Japan.
For the past seven years, however, it has remained the top supplier of carrageenan, a gelling agent used extensively as thickener or emulsifier in commercial products (medicine, toothpaste, ice cream, chocolate, cosmetics, and beer).
"Given a few years more, the Philippines may yet emerge as the world’s premier seaweed producer," said Dr. Steeve Godilano, an expert in geographic information system (GIS) of the Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Agricultural Research (DA-BAR).
GIS can give a big push to the full development of the local seaweed industry, Dr. Godilano stressed at the Second Agriculture and Fisheries Forum conducted recently by DA-DAR headed by Director Nicomedes P. Eleazar.
A GIS is composed of computer hardware, software, and spatially referenced data. it can store, manage, retrieve, and perform analysis on data.
GIS displays this information in map form. As a technology, it has found wide acceptability in such areas as land-use and resource management, environmental modeling, and even political redistricting.
As a management tool, it can synthesize, analyze, retrieve, and produce spatial information needed by policymaking in agriculture, business, transport, and other service organizations in managing spatially referenced resource outputs.
Through GIS, Dr. Godilano said, the exact location and statistics of possible seaweed production sites in the country where technology commercialization could be implemented has been provided.
Ideal seaweed sites should have gentle waves, balmy wind, and clean water with the right temperature (27-30ºC), depth (not less than 30 centimeters during the lowest tide), and salinity level (30-35).
As per the GIS analysis based on the data available at the DA-BAR GIS laboratory, it was found that total coastal area that is within the 15-kilometer municipal waters is approximately 32.6 million hectares.
About 7.8 million ha (23 percent), mostly concetrated in the Visayas and Mindanao, are highly suitable for seaweed production. Approximate area in the Visayas is 2.5 million ha assuming that Palawan is part of Region 6.
On the other hand, 14.5 million ha (46 percent) are moderately suitable.
Palawan and Tawi-Tawi have the biggest highly suitable area of more than one million ha.
BAR preliminary studies also corroborated DA-Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) data showing that Region 4-B and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) have the highest seaweed producton since 2001 (263,946 and 379,811 metric tons, respectively, in 2003).