Filipino vegetable farmers urged to tap growing Asia Pacific market

Global seed supplier East-West Seed is banking on the potential of Filipino vegetable farmers to be able to capture the growing Asia Pacific market, which is expected to worth US$3 billion by 2021.

The Philippines currently only has $240-million share in the growing Asia-Pacific vegetable market, lagging behind Japan, Vietnam, and Indonesia and has to regularly import more than $3-million worth of vegetables to cater to local demand.

Mary Ann Sayoc, East-West Seed General Manager, said there is a lot of potential in the Philippine vegetable sector because the country’s production is not even enough yet to cover the demand locally.

“Annually, the country’s vegetable production is only increasing by almost 2 percent and the growth of area being dedicated to planting vegetables is at 1.7 percent. The country’s annual growth rate for vegetable production is close to 2 percent, not enough to meet even the local demand for vegetables,” Sayoc said.

East-West Seed, an integrated vegetable seed company and one of the 10 largest seed companies in the world, is now hoping to remedy this situation by influencing more farmers to earn more by planting vegetables in addition to their existing crops.

“We do this by making vegetable farming easy and accessible and providing our smallholder farmers with the right kinds of seeds and teaching them modern techniques,” Sayoc said.

Sayoc said that East-West Seed is on a mission to help smallholder farmers realize the potential of vegetable farming and how it could be a lucrative business.

“East-West Seed saw that there are three challenges facing the local vegetable industry: Our inability to compete in the billion dollar Asia-Pacific vegetable market, the perception that vegetable is not a profitable business and the low volume of vegetables thereby affecting food and nutrition sustainability. All these three challenges, East-West Seed is helping to address," Sayoc said.

The inadequate supply of fresh produce is also seen as one of the reasons why Filipinos are among the lowest consumers of vegetables in the AsiaPacific region on a per capita level.

“The Philippines consumes less than half the amount of vegetables that Vietnam does. Over 30 percent off the Philippine population is overweight and malnourished. Therefore, an increase in the availability, affordability and consumption of nutrient-dense vegetables is one way to combat malnutrition. East-West Seed is in partnership with the Department of Agriculture and other stakeholders to combat this problem,” she said.

Sayoc said for all of the problems facing the local vegetable industry, the solution could start with one quality seed.

“If we provide farmers with quality seeds, then they get better yield and they would earn more,” Sayoc further said.