RiceUp with Elvin Laceda
Data from the World Bank indicates that total employment in agriculture in the Philippines is at almost 26 percent as of 2017. Obviously, agriculture plays an important part as it is the country’s food source, with farmers responsible for feeding the rest of the nation.
Ironically, the farmers are among the most impoverished Filipinos as a big portion of what should be their earnings go to exploitative middlemen and traders, compounded by the lack of postharvest facilities, and outdated farming techniques as well as the threat of climate change that affect harvest.
It is fortunate therefore that there are bright young individuals like Elvin Jerome Laceda who make use of their talent and knowledge to make farmers self-reliant and empower them financially.
Elvin was asked by Speaker Gloria Arroyo to call on us at the Philippine Embassy in Washington, D.C. I requested the Embassy’s Economic Minister JV Chan-Gonzaga, Economic Assistant Mylo Fausto and Agriculture Attaché Dr. Josyline Javelosa to join us for the meeting.
According to Elvin, it was the experience of his grandfather in Lubao, Pampanga that imbued in him the desire and passion to uplift the lives of farmers and give them the compensation they deserve for the backbreaking work that they do. He took up Agricultural Engineering in Bataan State University as a scholar of Pampanga Rep. and now Speaker Gloria Arroyo.
In 2016, he founded RiceUp, a social enterprise project that allows farmers to directly connect with consumers. A freshman Biology major at Brigham Young University (BYU)-Hawaii at the time, Elvin worked alongside 18 other Filipinos in Hawaii to develop an app that would help Filipino farmers communicate with households and the market using an inclusive business model aimed at simplifying logistics.
The app won second place in BYU’s “Great Ideas Competition” under the social enterprise category, and the cash prize provided the funding to start developing the app in the Philippines. Today, RiceUp is being used by 50 farmers who have increased their earnings from $70 a month to as much as $700 a month.
Elvin, who is continuing his studies at BYU-Hawaii taking up Entrepreneurship and Political Science, shares that they have built a school in Pampanga known as the RiceUp farm school to enable farmers to become “agripreneurs.” Aside from directly connecting farmers to the market (buyers composed of individuals, families and even small businesses), RiceUp also teaches digital literacy and introduces farmers to a more innovative way of farming, among other objectives.
Validated by the Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Training Institute, the RiceUp project presented by Elvin Laceda and his teammates from BYU-Hawaii was named as the 2018 Enactus United States national champion last May. The judges for the said competition (participated in by 457 other Enactus teams coming from 87 colleges and universities) were composed of hundreds of senior executives from some of the most well-known American companies that include Coca-Cola, Hallmark, Unilever and Walmart.
The RiceUp project got the attention of the judges because it helps bridge the economic gap between Filipino farmers and their market, utilizing technology to equip the farmers with enhanced skills through education, and developing sustainable community models through agripreneurship. The RiceUp team will represent the US in the forthcoming Enactus World Cup to be held at Silicon Valley in October, with teams from 35 other countries participating.