Garcia urges Cebu farmers to plant more corn
CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Capitol is encouraging Cebuano farmers to plant corn “aggressively” in 2020.
Governor Gwendolyn Garcia said she instructed the Provincial Agriculture Office (PAO) to focus on supporting farmers to increase their corn production by next year.
Garcia said planting more corn than rice would be a wiser approach for Cebuano farmers considering the quality of land in the province.
“I said focus on the improvement of the production of corn. Di man ta rice-producing unya pila ra man atong flat lands ug kinahanglan pa gyud og irrigation,” Garcia said in an interview with reporters on Tuesday, October 8.
(We are not a rice-producing province ever since because we have limited flat lands and we still need to invest in irrigation systems.)
Garcia said the farmgate prices of rice dropped because of the rice tariffication law.
Garcia said the PAO intends to help farmers achieve five to seven metric tons of corn yield for every hectare of farmland.
Base on the 2018 records of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), Cebu holds the highest corn production in Central Visayas at 54 percent.
Cebu produced 69,000 of the 127,000 metric tons of corn of the region’s yield in 2018.
This, however, is 9,000 metric tons lower than the 78,000 metric tons that the province produced in 2017.
In the past three years, the highest yield was in 2016 when Cebu produced 84,000 metric tons of corn.
“We will be very aggressive in the planting of corns. Tabangan nato atong mga (Let us help our) farmers achieve a harvest of five to seven tons per hectare. That’s really going to improve the life of our farmers,” said Garcia. / celr
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