2 weeks Ago
The Makati Business Club has been focusing on the agriculture sector, holding its first-ever agriculture summit last year. By agriculture sector, we mean specifically the small-scale farmer and fisherfolk sector. Large-scale agribusiness, especially the exporters of pineapples, bananas, and growers of tobacco and other cash crops, seem to be doing good business.
Agriculture is the fundamental basis of almost all economies and the principal challenge of development. If you don’t have a robust agricultural sector, you won’t have a healthy domestic market for local industry. Our agriculture sector should be middle-class, but instead, it is ground zero of poverty in the country.
Here are the problems: The Makati Business Club (MBC) has been working on ways for the private sector to address these many problems. Our agriculture summit proposed an initiative for private corporations to “adopt” cooperatives to achieve scale. The private corporation will first upskill the cooperative by providing training in basic business operations as well as technology to improve the quality and productivity of the specific crop.
It will then leverage its connections to help the cooperative finance its working capital requirements, processing equipment, logistics, and other assets. There will be a drive to help the cooperative capture the value chain beyond production all the way to post-harvest, processing, packaging, marketing, distribution, and even branding and retail. We have started a pilot project, wherein an MBC member will adopt a coffee cooperative based in Bukidnon.
We will take this step-by-step, learn from the experience, and refine the process. Once we have achieved positive results, we will then try to spread the learning to other projects. —————- Rafael ”Apa” Ongpin is the executive director of the Makati Business Club.
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