Ilocos food plant names consultant

The National Tobacco Admnistration (NTA) announced the appointment of a former government bureaucrat as consultant of the NTA-run PGMA-Multiline Food Processing Plant.

NTA Admnistrator Carlitos Encarnacion identified the plant’s new consultant as Amor-fina Galaraga who served as senior agriculturist and unit head for meat processing of the research division of the Bureau of Animal Industry.

She was also concurrent service unit head of the meat processing and slaughterhouse unit of the Animal Products Dvelopment Center of BAI.

In hiring Galaraga, Encarnacion said it his agency’s aim to professionalize food proces-sing in the huge plant whose management and operations were entrusted to NTA by Ilocos Sur Governor Luis "Chavit" Singson.

Multiline, a pet project of the governor, is intended to provide Ilocos farmers a steady market for their produce.

Galaraga was a PCCARD graduate fellow at the University of the Philippines-Los Baños and a UP-NSDB scholar at the UP-Diliman Graduate School in l989-93. She holds a Master of Science in Food Science from UPLB and took Bachelor of Science in Food Technology at the Araneta University.

She is currently a consultant in four big food companies ‑ 7J and A Food Co., Buena Foods, Console Foods Intrenational and Dalisay Farms.

Among her awards were study tours to Asian and European countries on meat processing.          

NTA has tapped tobacco farmers and their families in hog fattening and poultry raising activities to supply PGMA-Multiline with its requirements.