Next admin wants PH as world’s ‘top coconut producer’

The next administration wants the country to regain its status as the top coconut producer in the world even if it means making additional 600,000 hectares of land across the country available to coconut farming.

Even if it seems like a huge target, Incoming Agriculture secretary Emmanuel Piñol said this is doable.

“For coconut, we will regain our status as the number one coconut country in the world. We will re-plant coconuts covering additional 600,000 hectares of land over the next six years and this is doable kasi nabilang na yung seed maps [because it has already been taken into account in the new seed map],” Piñol said.

“There’s already an inventory where we will get it [the seeds] and everything,” he added.

As of now, the Philippines is the second top coconut producing country in the world, next to Indonesia.

According to the Statistics Division of Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Indonesia produces 35.8 percent of the world’s coconut needs, while the Philippines contributed 30.0 percent.

To be exact, Indonesia produced 18.3 million metric tons (MT) of coconut in 2014 (latest year for which statistics are only made available as of January 2016), while the Philippineds did 15.35 million MT during the same year.

Next to them are India (11.9 million MT), Brazil (2.89 million MT), and Sri Lanka (2.5 million MT).

The coconut industry by any measure is a major agriculture industry in the Philippines.

According to a data provided by United States Agency for International Development, coconut lands in the country comprised 1.4 million farms or 29 percent of all farms in the Philippines.

Similarly, physical area of coconut lands totaled 3.32 million hectares, higher than rice and corn. By island group, Luzon had 20 percent, Visayas 34 percent, and Mindanao 46 percent.

One of the major export products that the country produces from coconut is coconut oil.

In 2015, United Coconut Association of the Philippines (UCAP) reported that the country’s coconut oil exports more than doubled.

It said that coconut oil exports reached 57,355 metric tons in December, 2015, up by 102.6 percent from 28,304 MT a year earlier.

Meanwhile, aside from coconut industry, Piñol also wants to rehabilitate the abaca industry.

The country’s total abaca export earnings from January to December 2015 stands at USD 114.79 million, 3.1 percent higher than the USD111.334 million seen in the prior year.

A data from Philippine Fiber Industry Development Authority (PhilFida) also showed that the country shipped 96.1 million kilos of abaca to other countries last year, 23 percent higher than the 78.1 million it did in the same period in 2014.