AGRIBUSINESS entrepreneur Rene Pamintuan said that he once approached the head of the Department of Agriculture (DA) High Value Crops Division, and asked her whether or not they have a national strategy for fruit plantations, and she quickly answered in the negative.
Mr. Pamintuan recalls that immediately, he knew that the fruit industry is not going anywhere at all.
As a fruit producer himself, Mr. Pamintuan knows that by then, about three years beforehand, Vietnam was already bragging about earning 8.5 billion dollars for their fruit exports.
He says that without such a strategy, we cannot move forward on being successful in plantations, in value chains, in processing and in distribution. He said that the problem is having a micro mindset about how the fruit industry should be managed.
Beyond having a national strategy for fruit plantations, I believe that we should have a broader National Fruits Exports Strategy instead, to be led by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), but involving the DA, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and the Department of Health (DOH) as participating agencies, the latter on behalf of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
I say it should be led by the DFA, because this is a gargantuan task that requires economic diplomacy as a solution.
When the Foreign Service Act was passed, there was an expectation that the DFA will shift its orientation from political diplomacy to economic diplomacy, especially because the cold war has already ended.
The bottom line is that economic diplomacy is a selling job and there is no other way around it. It’s either we sell or we sink.
MORE ARGUMENTS FOR A FOOD CZAR
In a prior article, I proposed the appointment of a food czar who should have cabinet rank, and who will perform a staff function that is reporting directly to the President, but will have a collegial relationship with the other cabinet members who are performing food related line functions.
As it is now, many food-related functions within the government bureaucracy are fragmented, meaning that they are spread out all over and more often than not, they are also overlapping with each other.
In political science, we refer to that as being “balkanized”, meaning that it is broken up into many parts.
Mr. Pamintuan says that we could see this fragmentation in terms of the DTI being on top of food manufacturing, the DOH being on top of food licensing through the FDA, the DOST being on top of providing some machineries through the PHILMECH, and the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) being on top of agriculture education through the state colleges and universities (SCUs).
Mr. Pamintuan says that most Southeast Asian countries that are beating us today in food production and food exportation have unified government agencies that are on top of the entire food supply chain, from planting to marketing, so to speak.
He adds that if we could implement curriculum changes in agriculture education, nothing much could change. Imagine combining the curriculums of UP Diliman and UP Los Baños. That could be a good start to produce more agripreneurs./PN
