BANGUED, Abra(PIA) — The Department of Agriculture (DA) held consultation meeting with the provincial and municipal local government units (LGUs) in Abra for the fourth leg of DA-Cordillera’s consultation meeting among the provinces of the region.
This served as a venue to identify and level off agricultural programs and projects in preparation for the 2025 budget hearing of the department. It invovled the LGUs in the planning process as well as in the proposals of their local programs and projects.
The meeting was attended by some mayors, the municipal agriculturists and the Sangguniang Bayan Committee on Agriculture.
During the presentation of DA’s thrusts and strategic agenda, DA-Cordillera Planning Division chief Susan Balanza reported that 7.7% of the region’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth last year came from the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector.
She also presented the poverty incidence (PI) among Cordilleran farmers, where there was a downtrend from a comparative data from 2015, 2018 and 2021-from 36.8 percent PI in 2015 to 20.4 percent in 2018, down to 15.6 percent in 2021.
However, in spite of the recent growth rate in the past years, the agriculture, fishery and forestry sector incurred a negative growth rate last year, per Philippine Statistics Authority data. This was reportdly due to the effects of the COVID19 pandemic.
DA-Cordillera Regional Executive Director Jennilyn M. Dawayan said that LGUs play a crucial role in revamping programs and projects to lift Cordillera farmers out of poverty in the next years.
“We are already in the budget hearing for 2025, that’s the purpose of this meeting. Although we’ve already submitted our proposals but we do not focus only on that but we also like to see how we can respond for 2026,” she said.
“We are looking at Abra as one of the possible expansion areas for our increase production in rice,” Dawayan said.
Rice, yellow corn, white corn, highland vegetables and coffee are the top five priority commodities of the Cordillera region in agriculture.
For 2025, the expected budget for the Cordillera for agriculture is more than P5 billion. (JDP/CAGT – PIA CAR, Abra)
Villaviciosa Vice Mayor Marjorie Lagen attends the DA Consultation meeting where concern on depleting water source in the municipality and some alternative solutions to drought are tackled (CAGT – PIA CAR, Abra)
