Maiden Issue  n  September 2007

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Harvesting green and white gold

AFTER successfully embarking on the massive information, education communication (IEC) and advocacy on biotechnology, we started to move forward and introduced agri-business ideas.

Our idea is to turn brilliant science into smart business, which is the practical solution to the many problems besetting our country – particularly the daunting problem of having more hungry mouths to feed and less land devoted for food production.

We have aggressively embarked on a program to promote farming for natural ingredients, optimistic that the Philippines has all the potential to make it big when it comes to farming for natural ingredients. Biotechnology will increase productivity and improve product value and quality of natural ingredients.

We are optimistic that we can turn sleepy agricultural towns into major suppliers of raw materials for the world’s natural ingredients industry in due time.

The Biotechnology Information and Organization Network (BIONet) which the we helped established in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao will soon embark on a program to sustain what we started to promote–farming for natural ingredients and helping boost the economy of the poorest provinces in the country.

Some farmers have started to venture into the production of papaya latex which is being processed by a local biotechnology company for the supply of papain, a natural ingredient with many uses and has a big market demand.

Truly, there’s more than just food in papaya, which could have convinced farmers to go plant it. Its byproducts–whether it be food, pharmaceuticals or cosmetics – has a much bigger market available, yet we still don’t realize it, simply because we refuse to look at the papaya with an imaginative mind.

Thanks to our partners like Secura Philippines Corp. and Secura International Corp., we are now aware not only of the white gold in papaya latex, but the green gold in malunggay leaves.

Malunggay, I boldly predict, will be next best thing that can happen to Philippine agriculture.

As we embark on a program to promote backyard planting and commercial plantation of the “miracle tree,” we will realize not only its many benefits as a nutritious food, but its agri-business potentials as well.

Over the past year, we have strategically positioned ourselves for the massive production of malunggay planting materials as we embark on another program to promote the agri-business potentials of this seemingly unimportant vegetable.
As we embark on our malunggay program, our farmers will realize that this “poor man’s food” is not just a vegetable, but a natural ingredient for food, pharmaceutical and cosmetics as well.

And like the papaya fruit that farmers often taken for granted, malunggay will soon find its place on top of our list of high-value vegetables, not just because of the nutritional value of malunggay, but but because of the opportunity it will soon offer the farmers to harvest the green gold. And that, I say, will be very, very soon.

Alicia Ilaga is the director of the Department of Agriculture Biotechnology Program. 

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